Journal of Film Preservation N° 56 - FIAF

Journal of
Film Preservation
Revue de la Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film 56 • June / juin 1998
Published by the International Federation of Film Archives

Journal of Film Preservation N° 56
Louise Brooks by Hans Casparius (SDK)
News from the Affiliates / Nouvelles des Affiliés
2 Amsterdam
4 Jerusalem
5 Mexico
FIAF
7 The Administration of the Federation: some preliminary
results from an analysis of past Executive Committees of FIAF
by Roger Smither
Historical Column / Chronique historique
18 80 Days: Discoveries from a Unique Collection
by Brian Taves
23 Where do we go from here?
by Martin Koerber
27 Restoration(s) / Restauration(s)
28 On « Wild » Film Restoration, or Running a Minor
Cinematheque
by Enno Patalas
39 Miracolo di Bologna
by Peter von Bagh
New Restorations Projects / Nouveaux projets de restauration
44 Le Service des Archives du Film du CNC (Bois d’Arcy)
Open Forum
50 Out of the Attic : Archiving Amateur Film
by Jan-Christopher Horak
54 There Was this film about ... The Case for the Shotlist
by Olwen Terris

In Memoriam
58 Ricardo Muñoz Suay (1917-1997)
by Nieves López-Menchero
June / juin 1998
International Groupings / Groupements internationaux
61 The Council of North-American Film Archives - CNAFA
by Iván Trujillo Bolio
62 Third Nordic Film Archives Meeting
by Vigdis Lian
63 SEAPAVAA - Two Years on
by Ray Edmondson
66 CLAIM Meeting held in Prague
by Iván Trujillo Bolio
66 Association des Cinémathèques Européennes - ACE
by José Manuel Costa
Publications
69 Uncharted territory : Essays on early nonfiction film
69 Pierre Hébert, l’homme animé
70 De la figure au musée imaginaire
72 AFI publishes catalog on Ethnic-american films
72 Jubilee Book. Essays on Amateur Film/Rencontres autour des
Inédits
73 Footage : The Worldwide Moving Image Sourcebook
74 La Crise des Cinémathèques... et du Monde
FIAF Bookshop / Librairie FIAF
Journal of Film Preservation
Bisannuel / Biannual
ISSN 1017-1126
Copyright FIAF 1998
Comité de Rédaction
Editorial Board
Chief Editor/Editeur en Chef
Robert Daudelin
Members / Membres
Mary Lea Bandy
Paolo Cherchi Usai
Gian Luca Farinelli
Michael Friend
Steven Higgins
Steven Ricci
Hillel Tryster
Résumés / Summaries
Eileen Bowser
Christian Dimitriu
Editorial Assistant
Sophie Quinet
Graphisme / Design
Meredith Spangenberg
Impression / Printing
Poot
Bruxelles / Brussels
Editeur/ Publisher
Christian Dimitriu
Fédération Internationale des
Archives du Film - FIAF
Rue Defacqz 1
1000 Bruxelles / Brussels
Belgique / Belgium
Tel : (32-2) 538 30 65
Fax : (32-2) 534 47 74
E-mail : fiaf@skypro.be

Amsterdam
The Nederlands Filmmuseum
Le Regard du spectateur
Le Nederlands Filmmuseum organise,
du 22 au 25 juillet 1998 son troisième
Atelier d’Amsterdam. Celui-ci, intitulé
Le regard du spectateur aura pour but
l’étude de films des collections du NFM
portant sur des sociétés non occidentales
et non urbaines réalisés par des
cinéastes occidentaux pour des publics
occidentaux. L’intérêt de ces films,
conçus comme produits de
divertissement, réside principalement
dans le fait que, plutôt que les sociétés
décrites, ils illustrent la manière de voir
de ces réalisateurs et de ces publics et
documentent les sentiments, les
fantaisies et les idées (préconçues) sur le
sujet filmé.
Une question importante à laquelle
l’Atelier tâchera de répondre est : « En
tant qu’archivistes, historiens, cinéastes,
qu’est ce que nous faisons avec ce
matériel aujourd’hui ? »
News from the Affiliates /
Nouvelles des Affiliés
3rd Amsterdam Workshop: ‘The eye of the beholder’
Nico de Klerk
From 22 through 25 July 1998 the Nederlands Filmmuseum will organize
its 3rd Amsterdam Workshop. This workshop, called ‘The eye of the
beholder’, will focus largely on documentary material from the NFM film
collection about non-western (and non-urban) peoples and cultures
made by western filmmakers for western film audiences. Furthermore,
these films were for the most part shown in western commercial cinemas,
that is to say, they were largely made to entertain. The workshop,
then, is not concerned with (academic) ethnographic filmmaking; accuracy
of representation is not a consideration in this project. The interest
of these films lies primarily in the way they document their makers’ and
audiences’, in short their beholders’ ways of seeing, their feelings and
fantasies and (preconceived) notions about the subjects filmed.
This kind of film material merits special attention. For one thing, since
the post-war years, more particularly since the era of decolonization, it
has fallen into disrepute. That hasn’t made the films go away. On the
contrary, many archives of former colonial empires are full of them. So
one basic question the workshop will address is, ‘What do we - film
archivists, film historians, filmmakers and others with a professional
interest in these films - do with it today?
Secondly, for more than half a century the cinema provided the public
with the most vivid image of the non-western (and non-urban) world.
However, one cannot help observing that during this period commercial
filmmaking especially appears to have largely and blatantly refused to
express or give an understanding of the experiences of the people filmed.
The films sometimes show sympathy, but empathy is conspicuously
absent. And although with this we do not mean to sneak the concept of
accuracy back in again, as a norm or standard to judge the films against,
still we cannot simply eliminate our knowledge of twentieth-century
colonial history and look at this material in a detached way, with no
regard for social and political events, then as well as now. In a way,
then, it seems as if this material constitutes some kind of missed opportunity.
With hindsight, this may well be part of a sadness one feels when
watching these films.
The film material eligible for this project was shot between the beginning
of the century and ca. 1960. The workshop’s delineation of these sixty
years is content—motivated and based on viewings of the available
material at the NFM. In view of the fact that the selection this topic
makes from the collection is concerned with matters of imaging - and
imagination - in a specific historical period (the last decades of colonialism
and the era of decolonization), contextual considerations were put
before purely cinematic ones in keeping the overwhelming amount of
material manageable.
The most significant context, then, for much of this material, was formed
colonialism (and de-colonization). Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to
simply, or exclusively, label this material as colonialist (or racist). For
2 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

present-day audiences these terms may function as formulas to allay
post-colonial feelings of guilt, to which this material doubtlessly appeals.
But such a response tells more about these audiences than about the
films, as such labels often completely ignore that the films in fact show
more than just colonialism - or what we think colonialism is. The films
may not have given a proper image of, or even a voice to, the people
filmed, but apart from documentating the fascinations and blind spots of
their beholders, they also retain traces of the situations, the encounters
in which they came about. These labels, in other words, don’t do justice
to the specific character of cinematic records. In contrast to, for instance,
written sources, filmed reports presuppose a direct contact with those
who are being filmed. For that reason, ‘colonialism’ or ‘imperialism’ are
awkward, abstract terms for these films, shorthand for a complex of factors,
forces and influences. While together these make up social, political,
and economic reality, this reality, it is assumed, only partly
determines the shape of actual contacts, both filmed and unfilmed.
The Amsterdam Workshop, an initiative of the Research Department of
the Nederlands Filmmuseum, is a festival-cum-conference in which, on
the basis of screenings of a selection of films from NFM’s collection, film
historical and -archival topics are addressed that have not been studied
closely or programmed extensively. What we want to realize with this
workshop is a re-animation, re-vision, and re-evaluation of this so-called
colonial material in an international context. With ‘The eye of the
beholder’ we want to contribute to the international ‘research agenda’
and bring together experts who have either been working in this area or
those whose views we think are worthwhile for discussing this topic. It
is our assumption, moreover, that as an archival source film has neither
been mined adequately nor exhaustively. The workshop, therefore, is
also an opportunity to stress the importance of film archives in general
for work in this area, not only for historians, but also for anthropologists,
social historians, etc.
Secondly, we want to make this material known and visible again. We
want to look for formats in which this material could be screened and
programmed in ways that are acceptable to present-day audiences, or
even challenging. After all, television documentaries and news programmes
especially have contributed to an hesitation, to say the least, in
showing this material.
Participation in the Amsterdam Workshop is exclusively by invitation.
The NFM prefers to keep the number of participants restricted in order
to guarantee fruitful discussion. However, in order to ensure ‘virtual participation’
by a larger audience, the discussions will be taped, edited and
published on the Internet soon after the Workshop.
3 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
L’Atelier d’Amsterdam proposera des
projections et des conférences qui, autour
d’une sélection de films du NFM, abordera
ont des sujets d’histoire et d’archivistique qui
n’ont pas été étudiés ou programmés jusque
là. L’Atelier se propose une re-animation, une
re-vision et une re-évaluation de ce matériel
que l’on serait tenté de qualifier de colonial
dans le contexte international habituel.
La participation à l’Atelier est exclusivement
sur invitation. Pour permettre une participation
« virtuelle » plus large, les discussions
seront enregistrées, éditées et publiées sur
Internet.
La mirada del espectador
El Nederlands Filmmuseum organiza, del 22
al 25 de julio de 1998 su tercer Taller de
Amsterdam. Intitulado La Mirada del
espectador, éste tendra por objeto el estudio
de películas de la colección del NFM sobre
sociedades no occidentales y no urbanas
realizadas por directores occidentales para
públicos occidentales. El interés de estos
filmes, concebidos como meros productos de
diversión, reside sobre todo en el hecho que
documentan la manera de ver de estos
directores y de estos públicos, ilustrando así
los sentimientos, fantasías e ideas (preconcebidas)
sobre los temas filmados.
Una de les preguntas importantes a la que el
Taller procurará responder es : « ¿Qué
debemos, como archiveros, historiadores,
cineastas, hacer con este material hoy en
día ? ».
El Taller propondrá proyecciones y
conferencias y abordará temas de historia y
de archivística no estudiados o programados
hasta entonces. El Taller se propone una reanimación,
una re-visión y una re-evaluación
de material que se podria calificar un tanto
precipitadamente como colonial, en el
contxto internacional.
La participacion al Taller es exclusivamente
sobre invitación. Para facilitar una
participación « virtual » más amplia, las
discusiones seran grabadas, editadas y
difundidas por Internet.

Jerusalem
Steven Spielberg
Jewish Film Archive
Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961
Holocauste : Importante collection de
films à la Hebrew University.
La SSJFA a été choisie comme dépositaire de
l’une des plus importantes collections de
films sur l’Holocauste, celle du Ghetto
Fighter’s House, Musée de l’Holocauste et de
la Résistance. Situé au nord du pays, le
Musée a été créé en 1949 par des survivants
de l’Holocauste. C’est l’un des principaux
centres de documentation sur la Shoah. Il
abrite, en particulier, une collection
d’environ 1.600 films et vidéos sur
l’Holocauste. Il s’agit de films de fiction
récents aussi bien que de fragments de
documentaires jamais montés. Par ailleurs,
l’année dernière, dans le cadre d’un
programme commun, l’Archive d’Etat
d’Israël et le SSJFA ont préservé les
enregistrements en vidéo du procès d’Adolf
Eichmann à partir des bandes originales de
deux pouces. Cette année, une vidéo
cassette d’une heure sera éditée afin de
diffuser les extraits les plus marquants sur
les déclarations émises pendant le procès.
Holocausto : importante colección de
películas pasa a la Hebrew University
Major Holocaust Film Collection Comes to Hebrew University
The Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, has become the depository for one of the world’s largest collections
of films about the Holocaust, that of the Ghetto Fighters’
House, Museum of the Holocaust and the Resistance (Beit Lohamei
Haghetaot).
The Ghetto Fighters’ House, located in northern Israel, was established
by Holocaust survivors in 1949. It is among Israel’s premier Shoah documentation
centers, containing over a dozen large archival groups. The
film archive includes over 1600 films and videos on all aspects of the
Holocaust. The richness of the collection and the rarity of some of the
items can be attributed to two main factors. Firstly, the task of gathering
moving image records of the Holocaust period was undertaken immediately
after the Ghetto Fighters’ House was founded, resulting in one of
the earliest of these efforts by any such institution. The second, no less
important, factor was the energy of the late Miriam Novitch, who collected
all types of material, including film, for several decades, on behalf
of the Ghetto Fighters’ House, tracking down and acquiring hundreds of
titles in the process.
According to the agreement between the two institutions, all the 35 mm
and 16 mm prints in the Ghetto Fighters’ House collection will henceforth
be housed in the Spielberg Archive’s new premises on Mount
Scopus. Also to be deposited are hundreds of cans of Jewish historical
material that the Museum duplicated from archives all over the world
for use in its famous trilogy of documentary films dealing with different
aspects of the Holocaust: “The 81st Blow”, “The Last Sea” and “The Face
of the Revolt”. A third party to the agreement, the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, will fund the transfer of this material to
video viewing copies to be archived at the Museum in Washington, D.C.,
as well as in Israel. This tri-partite arrangement was negotiated by
Spielberg Archive Director Marilyn Koolik with Yossi Shavit, Archive
Director of the Ghetto Fighters’ House, and Raye Farr, Director of Film
and Video at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Work on this project, scheduled to be completed over a three-year
period, commenced shortly after the agreement was finalized in late
1997. The range of material in the collection is very wide, encompassing
everything from comparatively recent feature film productions to
unedited documentary fragments. This major deposit further consolidates
the Spielberg Archive’s position as a key resource for film documentation
of the Holocaust. Last year, in a co-operative venture that
marked the first time in Israeli history that government funds were spent
on moving image preservation, the Spielberg Archive and the Israel State
Archive digitally preserved the video record of the 1961 trial of Adolf
Eichmann from the original two-inch videotapes. The recording of the
trial itself was a technical landmark, as it was the first time that the
medium of video had been used for news purposes. This year, facilitated
by the preservation of the trial record, a one-hour videocassette will be
4 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

eleased containing some of the most important segments of testimony
delivered at the trial. The organizations responsible for this undertaking
are the Spielberg Archive, the Israel State Archive and Yad Vashem,
Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, which is
contributing the consultation services of its experts to help in selecting
the sequences to be included in the tape. Aimed primarily at Israeli educational
institutions, the tape will be distributed on a non-profit basis
under the auspices of all three institutions.
Spielberg Archive TV Series Begins Broadcasting
A series of short television programs, co-produced by the Steven
Spielberg Jewish Film Archive as a contribution to the State of Israel’s
50th anniversary celebrations, is now being broadcast on a weekly basis
from early February to late June, 1998. The series, comprising 14
episodes, was co-produced with Israel Educational Television, which will
also distribute it on cassette to high schools and other educational institutions.
Each installment consists of historical footage related to the pioneering
efforts that preceded and followed the birth of the State, and
each was based on a different film from the period in the Archive’s collection.
Aimed at a youthful audience, the project was the brainchild of
Educational Television producer Yossi Halachmi and historical consultant
Dr. Dalia Hurevitz. At present, the series exists only in a Hebrew version.
Disaster in Oaxaca
Francisco Gaytan
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it can be said that we are all aware
of the tragic story of Sergei Eisenstein’s journey to Mexico in 1930 to
film a movie produced by the American writer, Upton Sinclair. The
tragedy lies in the fact that conflicts arose between Eisenstein and
Sinclair with the result that Sinclair would not allow him
to edit the filmed material. Knowing the importance of
editing in Eisenstein’s work we realize that no editing
done by any other film-maker has the same power as
Eisenstein’s own. The editing we are familiar with, such
as Time In The Sun by Marie Seton, Storm over Mexico by
Sol Lesser, and even the more recent Que Viva Mexico,
edited by Eisenstein’s collaborator Alexandrov, all lack the
vitality and distinction of Eisenstein’s own work.
What few people know is that Eisenstein about that same
time made another film in Mexico, which was finished
and even shown here in Mexico. We at the UNAM Film
Archive knew about this film but we did not have a copy.
Fortunately the Museum of Modern Art in New York did
have this material and generously provided us with a
copy of the film, demonstrating once more how the collaboration
5 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
El SSJFA ha sido designado depositario de
una de las más importantes colecciones de
filmes sobre el Holocausto : la del Ghetto
Fighter’s House del Museo del Holocausto y
de la Resistencia. El museo ha sido creado
por sobrevivientes del Holocausto en el norte
del país en 1949. Se trata de uno de los
principales centros de documentación sobre
la Shoah. Una de sus secciones consta de
una colección de unos 1.600 filmes y cintas
magnéticas sobre diversos aspectos del
Holocausto. Se trata tanto de películas de
ficción recientes que de fragmentos de
documentales inéditos. Por otra parte, el
año pasado, el Archivo estatal de Israel y el
SSJFA presevaron conjutamente las
grabaciones en vídeo del proceso de Adolf
Eichmann a partir de la cintas originales de
dos pulgadas. Este año, una video cassete
de una hora sera publicada con el fin de
difundir las declaraciones más importantes
del proceso.
México
Filmoteca de la UNAM

Désastre à Oaxaca
En janvier 1931, la ville d’Oaxaca a été
dévastée par un tremblement de terre.
Lorsqu’il apprit la nouvelle, Eisenstein prit
un avion et s’y rendit en compagnie de son
équipe, Alexandrov et Tissé, et y tourna,
avec son style très personnel, divers aspects
du désastre.
L’existence de ce film était connue à l’UNAM,
mais il n’y avait pas de copie dans ses
collections. Par chance, le MoMA possédait
ce matériel et mit généreusement une copie à
la disposition de l’UNAM, démontrant une
fois de plus combien la collaboration entre
archives de la FIAF est importante pour la
préservation et la diffusion du patrimoine
cinématographique.
Disaster in Oaxaca, 1931, Sergei Eisenstein
Desastre en Oaxaca
En enero de 1931, la ciudad de Oaxaca fué
destruída por un terremoto. Cuando se
enteró, Eisenstein tomó un avión con su
equipo, Alexandrov y Tissé, y rodó, con su
estilo tan personal, diversos aspectos del
desastre. La UNAM tenía conocimiento de la
existencia de esta película, pero no disponía
de copia en sus archivos. Afortunadamente,
el MoMA poseía el material, que puso
generosamente a disposición, demostrando
una vez más cuán importante es la
cooperación entre archivos de la FIAF para
la preservación y la difusión del patrimonio
cinematográfico mundial.
1 La Memoria Restaurada, UNAM Film
Archive, 1996. Eduardo de la Vega.
between film archives within FIAF is of fundamental importance for film
preservation and diffusion. I once said that films earn for themselves
their restoration and diffusion, and I think this film is a case in point. It
is a documentary called in Mexico La destruccion de Oaxaca1 (The
Destruction of Oaxaca) according to newspaper items of that time,
although the copy provided by MoMA bears the title in Spanish: El
desastre en Oaxaca (The Disaster in Oaxaca.)
In January 1931 the city of Oaxaca (capital city of a southern state of the
Mexican Republic) was devastated by an earthquake. Eisenstein saw in
this catastrophe an opportunity to collect funds for the filming of Que
Viva México, by showing the film about Oaxaca not only in Mexico but
also in the United States and other parts of the world. As soon as he
heard about the earthquake he got on a plane with his equipment and
his team, Alexandrov and Tisse, and flew to Oaxaca where he filmed,
with his very individualistic style, diverse aspects
of the disaster. The film’s 28 captions (it is a
silent movie), punctuate the film’s progress but
given Eisenstein’s social vision they could not be
other than these examples :
“Rich people’s houses”; “Poor people’s houses”,- “God’s
dwelling place”; “The houses of the dead” ; “The
dreadful misery of these people cries out for help”.
While this film is not precisely a rescue made by
the UNAM Film Archive, it does seem to count as
a discovery of ours, as of the first time we
showed it in 1996.
By the miracles of present day communication,
on learning of the existence of this film, several
film archives have asked for it, not only here in
Mexico but also abroad. MoMA has authorized
its diffusion and it has therefore been shown very successfully all in
Spain, at the Filmoteca de la Generalitat de Cataluna, at the Huelva
Festival and the Lleida Festival. At the time of writing this article the
copy has also been authorized for showing at the Cineteca Nacional de
Mexico and in Europe at the Oesterreichisches Filmmuseum and at the
Landeshauptstadt München Filmmuseum.
6 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

The Administration of the
Federation: some preliminary results
from an analysis of past Executive
Committees of FIAF
Roger Smither
Introduction
During the discussion in Beijing of possible changes to the procedures to
be used in electing the Officers and Executive Committee members of
FIAF, it was suggested that it might be interesting or useful to study the
composition of previous Executives and analyse the results of previous
elections. Besides being of value in its own right as part of the study of
FIAF’s history, it was thought that such analysis might show up how
well, or how badly, the Federation functioned as a democracy - for
example, how much artificial pressure for rotation of office holders was
needed, how often the officers had been elected without a «real» election
(in other words, with only one name on the ballot paper), and so on.
More controversially, analysis of the composition of past ECs might also
provide a basis for informed consideration of the question of how true is
the perception that FIAF has traditionally been dominated by one or
more particular archive, country or linguistic/cultural group. This paper
offers a preliminary report on such an analysis.
Sources and their limitations
The information used in this analysis is not 100% complete. Data on the
composition of early Executive Committees is available from the book 50
Ans d’Archives du Film («the Golden Book» published in 1986) and its
predecessor International Federation of Film Archives / Fédération
Internationale des Archives du Film (published in 1958). These books do
not, however, give details about the elections to each EC, so do not permit
analysis of the number of candidates, etc. Information on elections
has only been analysed as far back as 1966 (the period for which I have
had access to copies of the minutes from General Assemblies). If there is
any desire to complete this project, further research will be needed into
the history of early elections.
It is also important to note, before making too much of the results of the
‘analysis’, that it hides or reflects some distorting factors. First of all, and
most obviously, there are various changes in the composition of the
Executive and the frequency of elections. The number of people constituting
the Executive increased from 4 in 1946 to 9 in 1953 and 15 in
1959. In 1961 it settled into the stable pattern of 3 officers, 8 members
and 3 reserves which lasted until 1987, when the present structure of 3
7 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
FIAF

officers plus 10 members was introduced. Another important change was
the adoption of the principle of enforced rotation in office with the introduction
of the «three term» rule, agreed by the General Assembly in
Lausanne in 1979. The frequency of elections changed as well - the
change to regular elections every two years was also introduced in 1979;
previously elections had normally been annual events.
Other distortions are less easy to spot, and I do not claim to have identified
all of them even in the elections I have looked at. However, some of
them offer interesting indications of ways in which FIAF has in the past
addressed the issue of reforming itself. For example -
• in 1967, the Minutes record one delegate declining nomination «out of
respect for the FIAF’s unwritten and traditional rule of requesting only
one member from each country to serve on the Executive Committee»
- a rule that has since been institutionalised to limit representation to
one member from each archive.
• in 1969 and 1970, special steps were taken to ensure the election of
members from outside Europe, two places out of eight being voted for
on this basis before the remaining places were filled. This procedure
was then abandoned, after Eileen Bowser, who had failed to be elected
to a non-European place, was in any case elected in the general ballot.
• in 1971, and at various elections thereafter, the outgoing EC
announced that it had made or was making specific efforts to ensure
that there should be more than one nomination for each of the officers,
though a study of the following pages will indicate that these efforts
have rarely had much impact on actual election procedures.
• also in 1971, the outgoing EC particularly asked for the election to the
EC of the host of the next year’s congress
• in 1972, it was suggested specifically to restrict one of the «reserve»
EC places to a delegate who had never yet served on the Executive
Committee
Results
The results of this analysis are now available in various ‘products’.
Complete information on the history of all previous generations of FIAF’s
Executive Officers and Committees has been compiled into two documents
which have been placed with the Secretariat in Brussels, where
they can be made available for anyone interested in reading them. The
first document is a ‘time line’ showing the changing composition of the
Officers and of the Executive Committee over the sixty-year history of
the Federation. The second is an alphabetical ‘Who’s Who’ which identifies
the 102 people named in the ‘time line’ by listing their parent archive
and their service on the Executive. From these two documents are
derived the tables and charts reproduced in the following pages.
Preliminary conclusions derived from this analysis are offered in two
groups of observations, given below. Observation Group 1 examines various
questions relating to the degree of ‘turnover’ in the composition of
8 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

the FIAF Executive. Observation Group 2 examines questions relating to
the origins of those serving as FIAF’s Executive over the past sixty years.
OBSERVATION GROUP 1: ‘TURNOVER’
1A. Turnover: arrival of «new faces» in the EC
In the 40 Executive Committees that have held office since 1946, on
average just under 2.5 new members have joined the EC after each
election
One measure of ‘turnover’ in an administration is the extent to which
elections do - or do not - introduce «new faces». In spite of the general
impression that FIAF inclines to stability, there have only been 4 elections
out of the 40 held since the revival of FIAF in 1946 at which no
new faces were introduced onto the Executive. At all other elections,
between 1 and 8 new people joined the ranks of those elected, the average
being 2.37. (See Chart 1.) This position would seem to be reasonably
satisfactory, although at the extremes, while zero turnover is certainly not
good, it could be argued that a turnover of 8 people out of a Committee
of 13 (as happened in 1993) represents a threat to continuity that is just
as unhealthy.
Eight
Seven
Six
Five
Four
Three
Two
One
None
Chart 1: Turnover in EC Elections
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
1B. Turnover: Contested elections to the three ‘Officer’ posts
There is a tendency for Officer posts to be filled by the election of
single, unopposed candidates. This tendency is stronger for the
offices of Secretary-General and Treasurer than it is for the
Presidency, and appears to be gaining in strength over recent years.
Another measure of turnover is the extent to which elections for the
9 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
F R E Q U E N C Y

three Officers’ positions and for the EC are contested. It is common
knowledge that several FIAF officers have had long tenure in their positions,
but this could be as a result of regularly winning contested elections.
A study of election returns, however, shows that this is not the
case. In the 23 elections that have taken place since 1966,
• the President was elected without anyone standing against him/her on
fourteen occasions, 61% of the elections held
• the Secretary-General was elected without anyone standing against
him/her sixteen times, 70% of the elections held
• the Treasurer was elected without anyone standing against him/her on
fourteen occasions, again 61% of the elections held
• If the focus is narrowed to the last 10 elections (1979 - 1997: also the
period in which FIAF has introduced the «three term» rule), then we
find the position changed as follows
• the President has been elected unopposed on six occasions (60%)
• the Secretary-General has been elected unopposed on seven occasions
(70%)
• the Treasurer has been elected unopposed on eight occasions (80%)
The above analysis would appear to confirm the opinion voiced by several
EC members in Beijing that elections for the Secretary-General and
the Treasurer have not in recent years conformed to the optimum levels
of democratic interest and involvement by the membership at large, and
formed part of the justification advanced in the 1998 Prague Congress
for changes to the current procedures.
1C. Turnover: Ratio of candidates to places in EC elections
In the 23 elections held since 1966, an average of 1.81 candidates
have offered themselves for each ordinary post on the EC. The figures
at all the last four elections have, however, been below this
average.
A third measure of the democratic ‘health’ of an organisation may be the
number of candidates presenting themselves for election to that organisation’s
governing body. Discounting the three separately-elected ‘Officer’
posts (which were the subject of the previous section) FIAF’s record in
this area over the past 23 elections shows an average of 1.81 candidates
offering themselves for each post on the Executive Committee. (See Chart
2.) This would appear to be quite healthy, although it may be noted that
the four elections so far held during the 1990s have all seen ratios lower
than this average - a trend that should give cause for concern if it continues.
10 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

Chart 2: Turnover in EC Elections
Ratio of Candidates to Places in EC Elections, 1966-1997
1997
1995
1993
1991
1989
1987
1985
1983
1981
1979
1978
1977
1976
1975
1974
1973
1972
1971
1970
1969
1968
1967
1966
0
1D. Turnover: Long-serving members of the FIAF Executive
In the more than fifty years since the reconstitution of FIAF in 1946,
102 people have served on the Executive. Of this total, 20 individuals
have served for 10 or more years. The longest service recorded
by any one individual is 31 years. In contrast to this figure, 23 individuals
have been elected to a single one- or two-year term.
A fourth and last measure of ‘turnover’ in an institution’s governing body
may be the periods of long service recorded by individuals. This information
is available in full in the information held at the Secretariat. Ranked
in order of number of years served, and listed with the offices they have
held, the 20 people with the longest record of service are listed below.
(See Table 1.)
Some of those listed in the table not only have long tenure on the EC in
general, but also have long periods in occupation of a single office.
However, it will be seen that the large majority of such cases are people
whose involvement with the EC dates back to the 1960s or earlier. The
introduction of the «three term» rule in 1979 appears to have signalled
the end of the era when this needed to be considered as a serious «problem»
- if indeed it ever was.
11 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5
RATIO

Note that the following abbreviations are used in the table for positions
held:
SecGen - Secretary-General
VP - Vice President
EC - full member of the Executive Committee
Res - reserve member of the Executive Committee (1961-1987 only)
TABLE No 1:
Long-Serving Officers and Members of the FIAF Executive
Yrs Name Positions Held
31 Jan De Vaal SecGen 1960-61; Treasurer 1963-64, 1965-66,
1977-85;VP 1953-54; EC 1949-53, 1961-62,
1966-69, 1974-77; Res 1958-59, 1962-63, 1964-
65, 1969-71, 1973-74, 1985-87
27 Ernest Lindgren SecGen 1951-52; Treasurer 1946-48; VP 1948-
51, 1952-54, 1955-71; EC 1954-55, 1972-73;
Res 1971-72
27 Jerzy Toeplitz President 1948-1972; VP 1946-48; EC 1972-73
23 Raymond Borde SecGen 1978-79; Treasurer 1985-91; VP 1972-
73, 1981-85; EC 1966-67, 1969-70, 1971-72,
1973-78, 1979-81; Res 1967-68
23 Robert Daudelin President 1989-95; SecGen 1979-85; EC 1974-
79, 1985-1989, 93-95
23 Wolfgang Klaue President 1979-83; VP 1973-79, 1985-89; EC
1968-73, 1989-91
23 Vladimir Pogacic President 1972-79; VP 1969-72, 1979-81; EC
1956-57, 1962-69; Res 1958-59, 1960-62
22 Eileen Bowser VP 1977-1985; EC 1969-71, 1972-77 1985-91;
Res 1971-72
21 Victor Privato VP 1958-79
20 Jacques Ledoux SecGen 1961-78; EC 1959-60, 1978-79; Res
1960-61
16 David Francis VP 1979-85; EC 1977-79, 1985-93
15 Henri Langlois SecGen 1946-48, 1955-57, 1959-60; VP 1954-
55, 1957-58; EC 1948-54, 1958-59, 1960-61
14 Eva Orbanz SecGen 1989-95; VP 1987-89; EC 1981-85
14 Paulo E Sales Gomes Treasurer 1952-53; VP 1951-52, 1956-58,
1959-60, 1963-65; EC 1948-49, 1953-56, 1961-
63; Res 1958-59
12 Anna-Lena Wibom President 1985-89; Treasurer 1991-93; EC
1981-85, 1989-91
11 John Kuiper VP 1971-77; EC 1970-71, 1977-78; Res 1978-81
11 Jon Stenklev Treasurer 1973-77; EC 1971-72, 1979-81; Res
1970-71, 1972-73, 1977-79
12 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

10 Freddy Buache SecGen 1957-58; Treasurer 1955-56; EC 1956-
57, 1978-81; Res 1973-74, 1975-78
10 Guido Cincotti SecGen 1985-89; EC 1981-85, 1989-91
10 André Thirifays SecGen 1952-55, 1958-59; Treasurer 1956-58;
VP 1949-52; EC 1955-56
In contrast to the above, it may be of interest to note that out of 99 people
recorded as having been elected to serve FIAF in some capacity
between 1938 and 1995, just under one quarter - 23 individuals - have
been elected only to a single term. (This figure excludes those elected for
the first time in 1997, since the length of their service on the EC can not
be predicted.)
OBSERVATION GROUP 2: ‘COMPOSITION’
For the purposes of this group of observations, the 102 individuals from
49 archives in 33 countries (counting Germany as a single country - 34
if the period of a divided Germany is taken into account) who have
served in some capacity or other on the FIAF Executive have been
«weighted» according to the number of years they served. This has generated
a unit of measurement that could be termed the «person-year» -
so that the Cinémathèque Québécoise, which has provided two members
of the Executive over the years (Françoise Jaubert with 2 years service,
and Robert Daudelin with 23) has a weighting of 25 person-years. The
analysis given on the following pages is made on the basis of this weighting.
2A. Composition: Archive representation on the FIAF EC
In the history of FIAF, 49 archives have contributed members to the
Executive. Of this total, 14 archives have contributed 20 or more
‘person-years’ of service - the greatest total by any one archive being
55.
Arranged according to FIAF’s traditional alphabetical listing by city, the
archives that have had staff members on the FIAF Executive between
1938 and 1999 (the end of the current term for the present EC), with
their respective weighting, are listed in Table 2A.
TABLE No 2A:
ARCHIVE REPRESENTATION ON THE EXECUTIVE
(alphabetical)
Amsterdam 35
Beograd 24
Berlin RFA 2
Berlin SDK 14
Berlin SFA 32
Bogota FPFC 4
Bois d’Arcy 6
Bologna 2
13 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Bruxelles 34
Bucuresti 7
Budapest 11
Buenos Aires 2
Canberra 2
Frankfurt DIF 2
Habana 12
Helsinki 3

Kobenhavn 14
Lausanne 17
Lisboa 4
London IWM 6
London NF(TV)A 55
Los Angeles UCLA 12
Madrid 6
Mexico UNAM 8
Milano 10
Montevideo CU 2
Montevideo SODRE 1
Montreal 25
Moskva 26
New York MOMA 39
Oslo 12
Ottawa 12
Paris CF 17
If the 14 archives with weightings of 20 or more person-years are separated
from Table 2A and listed in weighted order, the result contains not
only some predictable names but also some inclusions (and omissions)
that may be considered more surprising. (See Table 2B.)
TABLE No 2B:
ARCHIVE REPRESENTATION ON THE EXECUTIVE (weighted)
London NF(TV)A 55
New York MOMA 39
Amsterdam 35
Bruxelles 34
Berlin SFA 32
Warszawa 28
Toulouse 27
Moskva 26
Montreal 25
Beograd 24
Stockholm 24
Praha 22
Rochester 21
Sao Paulo 20
Whether any conclusions may be drawn from the above, to justify concerns
about the traditional dominance of the Federation by any single
archive, seems very questionable.
2B. Composition: National representation on the FIAF EC
Collated by country, the figures show 14 countries with over 20
years of collective service, of which 4 have 50 or more years service,
the greatest total by a single country being 76. (See Chart 3)
14 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Praha 22
Pune 6
Rio de Janeiro 8
Rochester 21
Roma 17
San Juan de PR 2
Rio de Janeiro 8
Sao Paulo 20
Sofia 8
Stockholm 24
Tokyo 2
Toulouse 27
Torino 2
Warszawa 28
Washington LC 4
Wien OFA 2
Wien OFM 6

Argentina
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Brazil
Bulgaria
Canada
Colombia
Cuba
Czech R
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Hungary
India
Italy
Japan
Mexico
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Puerto Rico
Romania
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
UK
Uruguay
USA
USSR
Yugoslavia
Chart 3: EC Service by Country
2C. Composition: Representation on the FIAF EC by Continent
and Language Group
If the figures given in the preceding pages are collated by continent and
language group, patterns emerge that appear to confirm the traditional
complaints that FIAF is heavily dominated, in geographical terms, by the
‘Northern Hemisphere’, and within that grouping very specifically by
Europe. In linguistic terms, the largest single group of members have
come from archives in countries where the first language is English, with
French in a reasonably close second place. The historic division among
other language groups is less clear cut than might be expected.
I suggest, however, that it would be unwise to load too much significance
into the very superficial analysis so far made of these issues. It
might be constructive to look more specifically at the geographical composition
of FIAF’s Executive in the period since 1979 (last ten elections)
than over the whole of its history since the significant expansion of FIAF
beyond Europe and North America is a relatively recent phenomenon. It
must also be pointed out that there are simply more archives in certain
15 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80

countries (and continents) than others, so a «fair» representation by distribution
of archives will tend to look distinctly «unfair» when mapped
according to geography. Equally, the ‘language’ issue would be better
explored if the category of those outside the English/French/Spanish
speaking groups took account of the preferred official languages of EC
members belonging to that category. These are not arguments for complacency,
but they do indicate the dangers of jumping to conclusions
without more careful research.
2C1. Representation by Continent
Collated by continent, the figures show an overwhelming domination
by Europe, whose archives have provided over 70 % of EC
membership over the years.
Chart 4: EC Service by Continent
Europe
72.3%
2C2. Representation by Language
Collated by language group, the figures show most clearly the need
for more careful analysis.
If the historic weightings of individual archives or countries are collected
according to native language, a position emerges that emphasises only
that the majority of EC business has always been done in a language
(whether English, French or Spanish) that is not native to the majority of
participants - 9 other native languages have each provided over 20 ‘person-years’
of EC service, 4 of which - German, Dutch, Portuguese and
16 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
North America
7.2%
English
23.9%
Asia/Pacific
1.5%
South & Latin America
9.0%
Chart 5: EC Service by Native Language
Other
51.3%
Spanish
5.6%
French
19.2%

Italian - actually score over 30 (30 representing 4.6 % of the total). As
already noted, however, it is not suggested that much importance be
attached to these «findings» without more research being done.
HISTORICAL SUMMARY
As a final ‘output’ from this survey, Table 3 offers a resumé of all those
who have held the three major offices in the Federation since its founding
in 1938. The table has been so arranged as to give an indication of
which Officers served together in each period.
TABLE No 3:
FIAF’s OFFICERS, 1938-1999
President
Abbott, John E
1938-39
Hensel, Frank
1939-40
Barry, Iris
1946-48
Toeplitz, Jerzy
1948-72
Pogacic, Vladimir
1972-79
Klaue, Wolfgang
1979-85
Wibom, Anna-Lena
1985-89
Daudelin, Robert
1989-95
Aubert, Michelle
1995-99
17 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Secretary-General
Langlois, Henri
1938-40
Langlois, Henri
1946-48
Barry, Iris
1948-49
Rognoni,
Luigi
1949-51
Lindgren, Ernest
1951-52
Thirifays, André
1952-55
Langlois, Henri
1955-57
Buache, Freddy
1957-58
Thirifays, André
1958-59
Langlois, Henri
1959-60
De Vaal, Jan
1960-61
Ledoux, Jacques
1961-78
Borde, Raymond
1978-79
Daudelin, Robert
1979-85
Cincotti, Guido
1985-89
Orbanz, Eva
1989-95
Smither, Roger
1995-99
Treasurer
Vaughan, Olwen
1938-40
Lindgren, Ernest
1946-48
Brusendorff, Ove
1948-52
Sales Gomes, Paulo E
1952-53
Lauritzen, Einar
1953-55
Buache, Freddy
1955-56
Thirifays, André
1956-58
Lauritzen, Einar
1958-63
De Vaal, Jan
1963-64
Lauritzen, Einar
1964-65
De Vaal, Jan
1965-66
Morris, Peter
1966-69
Geber, Nils-Hugo
1969-70
Konlechner, Peter
1970-73
Stenklev, Jon
1973-77
De Vaal, Jan
1977-85
Borde, Raymond
1985-91
Wibom, Anna-Lena
1991-93
Jeavons, Clyde
1993-95
Bandy, Mary Lea
1995-99

80 Days:
Discoveries from a unique collection
Historical Column / Chronique historique
Brian Taves
The organizing and cataloging of a valuable collection at the Library of
Congress has led to new discoveries about the filming of the definitive
version of Jules Verne’s classic 1873 novel, Le Tour du monde en quatrevingt
jours: Michael Todd’s adventure-comedy spectacular, Around the
World in 80 Days, first released in 1956.
Around the World in 80 Days was the culmination of showman Michael
Todd’s life; he died at age 50 in an airplane crash March 22, 1958, just as
his film was breaking box-office records and winning awards from all
over the globe. Todd’s widow was the actress Elizabeth Taylor. Nearly a
quarter-century after Todd’s death, while Taylor was married to John
Warner, a United States Senator from Virginia, she donated the film
footage that she had inherited from Todd to the Library of Congress.
This was an appropriate decision, since the Library has one of the
world’s largest collections relating to Jules Verne, and certainly the most
extensive holdings of Verne film and television adaptations of any
archive in the world. The Verne films at the Library of Congress are
highlighted by such rarities as the 1914 version of Michael Strogoff, the
first feature-length film adaptation of a Verne story, and the recent
restoration of With Williamson beneath the Sea, the 1932 filmed autobiography
of the pioneer of undersea photography who codirected Twenty
Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1916) and The Mysterious Island (1929)
(see ‘Journal of Film Preservation’, 52 [April 1996], 52-61).
The collection of Around the World in 80 Days footage consists of 426
reels of picture and sound track material, in several languages, in 16
mm., 35 mm., and 70 mm. The footage varies from preliminary rough
cut “workprints” to production elements, preprints, color separations,
tests, shots of the premieres, and “behind-the-scenes” footage. The
footage includes portions of the original 1957 German, Italian, and
French versions of Around the World in 80 Days, with the entire original
French soundtrack. Other original soundtrack material is broken down
into various components, such as music, sound effects, and dialogue.
Among the movie’s special treats were the amusing concluding credits
animated by Saul Bass and the superlative, soaring score by Victor
Young, perhaps the best he ever wrote, and the collection includes
preprint material on both the Bass and Young contributions.
Collections of this type, especially on a Hollywood feature, are unusual
in film archives, which generally hold only a standard theatrical release
print of a movie. As an independent production, released through
United Artists, there was no studio to properly care for the Around the
World in 80 Days footage. All of the material was stored in a warehouse
during the years after Todd’s death, and came to the Library of Congress
18 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

in 1982 in many poorly identified or completely unmarked cans. At the
time, no one on the staff of the Library’s Motion
Picture/Broadcasting/Recorded Sound Division had sufficient expertise to
sort, inventory, and identify the Around the World in 80 Days footage, and
most of it was placed in storage. However, later the Library was able to
take advantage of the special expertise of a member of the staff, Brian
Taves, who had just coauthored ‘The Jules Verne Encyclopedia’ and is
also writing a book on all 300 adaptations of Verne to movies and television
worldwide.
Michael Todd had been interested in Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingt
jours since he briefly sponsored Orson Welles’s 1946 theatrical production,
with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. Although Todd’s previous
experience was in the stage, he realized that, in the mid-1950s, with
audiences craving widescreen spectacles, Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingt
jours was ideal for an epic treatment encompassing nearly all the story’s
principal incidents in a three-hour running time. In mid-1954, Todd
bought rights to film the novel that had been held for two decades by
British producer Alexander Korda. At various times since the 1930s,
Korda announced a production with Maurice Chevalier starring as
Passepartout, then planned to work with on a film with Welles. Korda
shot a portion of an animated feature version, Indian Fantasy (1939),
preserved by the National Film Archive.
Todd was also looking for a vehicle appropriate for his new film process,
Todd-A0, developed in cooperation with the American Optical Labs. This
was the era when new techniques, such as 3-D and Cinemascope, were
hailed as a way for movies to offer an experience with which television
could not compete. One of the disadvantages of Cinemascope, used by
Walt Disney to film 20,000 Leagues under the Sea in 1954, was that in using
an anamorphic lens to squeeze a widescreen image onto standard 35 mm.
stock, there was distortion at the edges of the frame, particularly noticeable
in a panning shot. Todd-AO sought to supplant the anamorphic technique
by creating, instead, an image photographed and projected on a
larger, wider filmstock, doubling the 35 mm. width to 70 mm.
The new 70 mm. process posed extraordinary technical challenges, especially
for a neophyte film producer. Tests in the Taylor collection reveal
that the question of how 70 mm. would photograph such necessities as
miniature ship exteriors was an early concern. After a year of preparation,
principal photography began in September 1955 and was completed
at the end of the year, although various effects work and other
shooting continued until April 1956 (as indicated in cards in the collection
that document each day’s filming among several units). As director
Michael Anderson recalled to Brian Taves, shooting in 70 mm. was
essentially blind, because it was impossible to see “dailies” on a regular
basis, to view what had been shot the previous day and judge the work.
Nor could there be any process shots with 70 mm., filling in the background
of scenes. Anderson noted to Taves, “If you wanted to shoot the
Indians attacking the train you had to have a real train, take the sides
off, mount a camera platform, get the train up to speed, then get the
19 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
80 Days : Découvertes d’une collection
unique.
Around the World in 80 Days, sorti en
1956, a été le point culminant de la vie du
showman Michael Todd. Celui-ci disparut à
l’âge de 50 ans dans un accident d’avion en
1958, au moment même où son film
pulvérisait tous les records du box-office et
raflait de nombreux prix autour du globe.
La veuve de Todd, Madame Elisabeth Taylor,
presque 25 ans après, fit don du matériel
qu’elle avait hérité de feu son mari à la
Library of Congress. Ce fut un reflexe
heureux, car la LC - qui par ailleurs
conserve l’une des plus importantes
collections des adaptations de Jules Verne au
cinéma et à la télévision - était la mieux
préparée pour recevoir et préserver ce
matériel. Le fonds Taylor comprend une
grande variété d’éléments tels que 426
bobines d’image et de son, en plusieurs
langues, en 16mm, 35mm et 70mm. Le
matériel film comprend des rushes et copies
de travail, des séparations de couleurs, tests,
prises de vues des premières, tournages de
plateau, et bien d’autres curiosités. Il
constitue une source de documentation d’une
valeur inestimable pour l’étude de la
superproduction hollywoodienne de Michael
Todd.

80 Days : Descubrimientos de una
colección única
La vuelta al mundo en 80 días, estrenada
en 1956, fué el punto culminante de la vida
del showman Michael Todd. Este,
desapareció a los 50 años de edad en un
accidente aéreo ocurrido en 1958, en el
preciso momento en que el film pulverizaba
los records de taquilla y se llevaba los
mayores premios a través del mundo. La
viuda de Todd, la señora Elisabeth Taylor,
25 años más tarde, legó todo el material que
había heredado de su difunto esposo a la
Library of Congress. Se trata de un acto
feliz, ya que la LC - que por otra parte
detiene una de las más importantes
colecciones de adaptaciones de la obra de
Jules Verne al cine y a la televisión - estaba
bien preparada para recibir y preservar este
material. El Fondo Taylor está integrado de
una gran variedad de elementos tales como
426 bobinas de imagen y de sonido, en
varios idiomas, en en 16mm, 35mm et
70mm. El material film consiste en rushes y
copias de trabajo, separaciones de colores,
tests, tomas, rodajes de estudio y numerosas
curiosidades. La colección constituye una
fuente de documentación de un valor
inestimable para el estudio de la superproducción
hollywoodiana de Michael Todd.
horsemen up to speed outside and then say action to those playing the
scenes in the railway carriage.”
Making the schedule even more crowded was the necessity of shooting
two versions of the film, one in 70 mm., and another in CinemaScope.
At the time, it was impossible to transfer a film shot in 70 mm. to 35
mm. widescreen stock, and a CinemaScope version was essential so that
Around the World in 80 Days could play the many theaters only equipped
to show 35 mm. film. Most scenes were shot with the two different cameras
placed side by side, but sometimes scenes had to be reshot for the
benefit of one or the other camera. Consequently, there are actually two
different release versions of Around the World in 80 Days, and the Library’s
collection holds print and preprint material on both.
Todd found that raising financial backing necessary for the project was
difficult, especially since he was a Hollywood outsider. Often the movie
continued with just enough backing to keep progressing on a day-to-day
basis. After the project had been underway for nine months and Todd
was broke, he turned down offers to buy him out, holding on until
finally United Artists and Paramount Theaters came through with a
releasing deal and the necessary funding to complete work.
Humorist S.J. Perelman rewrote the script, staying very close to the
Verne novel, although James Poe and John Farrow (who was also originally
set to direct) sued and won a share of credit for authoring the original
draft. Associate producer was the talented William Cameron
Menzies, who selected the exteriors in Europe and the United States.
Kevin O’Donovan McClory, who began as an assistant director, became
steadily more important to the production and was ultimately also credited
as associate producer. McClory directed scenes in Paris, the Middle
East, Pakistan, Siam, Hong Kong, and Japan, before assisting in the editing
of the 680,000 feet of film exposed during the summer of 1956.
The expected budget doubled to $6 million as filming took place in 112
locations in 13 countries over 127 days of shooting (75 days for principal
photography under Anderson), employing, supposedly, nearly
70,000 people and 8,000 animals. In the United States, the principal
locations outside California were in Oklahoma and New Mexico, and
five Hollywood studio lots were used, with the bulk of the interiors shot
at RKO.
The result is what Todd called a show on film: a travelogue, a circus, a
revue, a comedy, a mystery, a romance, a Wild West show, and a bullfight
all rolled into one. Yet, unlike many such enormous productions,
Around the World in 80 Days does not seem heavy, but light and charming;
the awesome scale seldom dwarfs the story and characters.
Apparently most of the leads were chosen with relative ease, and David
Niven was quickly selected for the part of Phileas Fogg. By retaining
Verne’s satire of English manners and mores in the portrayal of Fogg, the
integrity of the book is preserved. The casting of the Mexican comedian
Cantinflas as Fogg’s French servant Passepartout does not strike a discordant
note, echoing Fogg’s own eccentricity.
20 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

However, deciding who would play the role of the Indian princess
Aouda proved more troublesome. The Library’s collection includes some
of the last tests for the role, in late September, 1955. These include
Jacqueline Park, a former Miss Ceylon inexperienced in acting, and two
actresses, Suzanne Alexander and Marla English. Only after deciding
against all of these was Shirley MacLaine brought in to portray Aouda; at
that time she had only appeared in two movies.
In addition, Todd fast-talked dozens of headliners into appropriate roles
as cameo stars, agreeing to alphabetical credits, which placed Charles
Boyer first on the list. There were countless others impeccably cast in
bits, such as Philip Ahn and Keye Luke, although
strangely they only appeared on secondary lists of
cameos. For once, a movie designed to feature a host
of cameo stars and overseas locations had the ideal
plot to integrate so many disparate elements, a fact
Verne himself had realized in the medium of his own
day when collaborating on the 1874 theatrical production
of his story.
Probably of greatest interest is the discovery of material
that was cut before the final release. This includes
two songs by Eddie Fisher, a close friend of the Todds
who would marry Miss Taylor after Todd’s death.
More significant was a modern prologue that was
shot but not included in the final movie. Fogg and
Passepartout board an airliner, with Charles Boyer
arranging for their tickets, just as he suggests their
balloon flight in the movie. Many of the other passengers
boarding the plane are the “cameo” stars who
will later appear in the movie during Fogg’s travels,
such as Victor McLaglen, Edmund Lowe, Cesar
Romero, Reginald Denny, Melville Cooper, Tim
McCoy, Buster Keaton, Joe E. Brown, and Frank
Sinatra. George Raft and Marlene Dietrich portray a
quarreling couple, a part they will also play together
in the San Francisco sequence. After boarding,
Passepartout walks about the airplane cabin, noticing
his fellow passengers, exchanging a wary glance with
Peter Lorre. Fogg takes his seat, talks to a stewardess,
and takes out a large blue-covered folio book to read, probably ‘Around
the World in 80 Days’. This planned modern-day opening to the story,
apparently to provide a framing device, is especially notable given that
other films have updated the journey to modern times by descendants of
Phileas Fogg, from the serial Around the World in 18 Days (1922-23) to
The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze (1963).
Despite the logistical problem that Todd doubtless had uniting so many
of his cameo stars at one time, after their various roles throughout the
production, the contemporary prologue was dropped in favor of a nonfiction
introduction. In this prologue, eliminated in some reissues,
21 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Around the World in 80 Days

Edward R. Murrow discusses the way the globe has seemed to “shrink”
in modern times. Murrow compares the view of the Earth from a modern
rocket with the early science fiction film, Voyage dans la lune, adapted
by Georges Méliès from Verne’s novels ‘De la terre à la lune’ and ‘Autour
de la lune’. The visuals of the Earth as seen from a rocket are echoed
during the story when Fogg and Passepartout take to the air in a balloon
and see Europe from the skies.
Footage of the New York and Hollywood premieres reveals them to have
been gala, star-studded affairs, with many of the cameo stars in attendance
along with the leads, and Mrs. Todd (Elizabeth Taylor), accompanying
Michael Todd. Around the World in 80 Days was an unparalleled
success at the box office and grossed an estimated $65 million alone in
the first two years of continuous, worldwide release; never before had a
movie been such an immediate and overwhelming hit. The movie won
five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, along with numerous international
honors. The popularity of Around the World in 80 Days would be
celebrated in 1957, on the first anniversary of its release, with a special
satire on The Phil Silvers Show and a chaotic all-star party in Madison
Square Garden, presented live to viewers as Around the World in 90
Minutes to commemorate the first anniversary of the movie’s premiere.
An abundance of behind-the-scenes footage was found in the Taylor collection
at the Library of Congress, attesting to the centrality of Todd’s
role in the creation of the film, as was indicated to Brian Taves by Ken
Adam, art director of Around the World in 80 Days. Todd not only scouted
locations but directed some sequences himself, although he relied on the
judgement of more experienced filmmaking hands like Anderson and
Menzies. Apparently a number of documentaries about the making of
the film during its shooting were conceived, but may never have been
completed. A 1968 television documentary entitled Around the World of
Michael Todd, directed by Saul Swimmer and narrated by Orson Welles,
told the story of the making of Around the World in 80 Days on the occasion
of the first international re-release of the movie.
Such Hollywood Verne films as 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954) and
most recently Master of the World (1961) have been reissued in restored,
letterbox editions with supplementary material not seen in many years.
When Around the World in 80 Days was last released theatrically, in 1984,
a half-hour was eliminated from the running time. Even the full-length
versions regularly shown on television or sold on video are invariably
panned-and-scanned, rather than shown in their original widescreen
aspect ratio.
Warner Bros., who currently owns the rights to the Todd production, has
long considered an 80 Days restoration, and the newly cataloged material
at the Library of Congress, with the discoveries and behind-thescenes
footage it contains, would have much to contribute.
22 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

Where do we go from here?
Afterthoughts on the 1997 Retrospective on G.W. Pabst in Berlin
Martin Koerber
A retrospective as we understand it includes a critical dialogue with the
film material. When a film archive takes responsibility for such an event,
it must be different from the retrospectives one experiences in “normal”
cinemas, municipal theatres or on television. In such venues, copies in
circulation are assembled to highlight the work of a particular director, a
genre, or some other theme. When we stage a retrospective, it should
always also be concerned with what cannot be shown elsewhere on such
occasions. The attention of the international professional and general
public must be drawn to the fact that an opportunity to see even wellknown
films again cannot simply be taken for granted. Why not link the
preservation and restoration of archive collections with Festival themes
to make the Berlinale Retro a showcase for this work?
The retrospective on the oeuvre of G.W. Pabst marks a further important
step in this direction. Our thanks are due to many partners in other
archives both for having understood what our objectives were and for
having adopted them, indeed, for having joined enthusiastically in the
common effort to evaluate collections, preserve surviving originals, and,
where feasible, to restore the most authentic possible versions. The
Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv in Berlin, for example, produced new preservation
material of three Pabst films and lent out numerous other, existing
prints. With the premiere of the reconstructed Die Freudlose Gasse, the
Munich Film Museum brought us nothing less than a film history sensation
- no-one in the audience can continue to maintain he had already
really known this picture. The final film of the Festival, too, Die Büchse
der Pandora, came to us from Munich in an extended and improved version,
in which parts of a copy from Gosfilmofond, Moscow, had been
inserted. The performance of new music for this film, composed by Peer
Raben and recorded on the initiative of the tv-station Arte also demonstrates
the many common interests that can unite in such a Festival
event: restoration, presentation, television broadcasting.
Numerous other titles were available in the fine versions that Enno
Patalas has produced over the past two decades in Munich; the only
regrettable aspect being that they are (and for the moment are likely to
remain) unique copies. We earnestly hope that Munich will do for these
films what Chris Horak, Klaus Volkmer, and Gerhard Ullmann have
already achieved for Freudlose Gasse - to check and improve these versions
on the basis of original material.
The Cineteca Nazionale in Rome lent some good copies and produced a
new preservation package and a new print of La Voce del silenzio on the
basis of the original negative. The archive of the CNC in Bois d’Arcy was
represented with a large number of Pabst’s films from his French period
23 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

G.W. Pabst
1 . More on this adventurous project in
Archive, No. 73, December 1997
in the 1930s, and for the first time presented the reconstruction of
Mademoiselle Docteur, also on the basis of the original negative, hitherto
believed lost but discovered in the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, complemented
by material from Prague and Rome1. (More on this adventurous
project in a recent issue of ARCHIVES.) Matthias Knop from the
Deutsches Institut für Filmkunde presented a working version of
Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, on which the DIF in collaboration with the
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung and the archives in Brussels,
Bologna, and Copenhagen had been working. The reconstruction has
since been completed, and is available from Wiesbaden and Bologna.
This new version incorporates sensational new material from SODRE in
Montevideo, amounting to a whole reel of scenes previously believed to
be lost forever. The archives in Wiesbaden, the
Cinémathèque Suisse and the Narodni Filmovy
Archiv are to be thanked for further loans. The collections
we have mentioned, but also many others
in Germany and abroad (which we cannot unfortunately
all mention here), have supported our work
by supplying detailed information on their collections
and their origin, and by permitting their material
to be viewed. We are especially grateful for this -
everybody knows it is unfortunately not always a
matter of course to gain access to such information
and to see the films with one’s own eyes, however
indispensable this might be. Only knowledge of the
available material makes it possible to assess the situation
of each individual title and to determine
copying procedures for new restorations.
Over half the titles we were finally able to exhibit
were announced as “restorations” or “reconstructions”, many being produced
on the occasion of the retrospective and to be seen for the first
time in this context. In short, it was a marvellous celebration - but however
satisfied we were with what had been accomplished, a glance at the
initial situation shows how desperate the position was at the outset. For
many titles there are unfortunately only unique copies of the complete
versions, which are work-prints (and consequently not really suitable for
exhibiting).
After ascertaining the material situation throughout the world in early
1996, we found - as expected - that even the works of a classic filmmaker
like Pabst, which all believe they know, cannot in any sense be
said to have survived in complete and established form. Two films by
Pabst, Gräfin Donelli and Man spielt nicht mit der Liebe have to be considered
completely lost. No-one has ever seen them since the first showings,
and not a line about them has been written since; which is not
surprising, for the little knowledge we could long since have gathered
from reading scripts, from contemporary reviews, and from the hundreds
of surviving stills (which have been kept for three decades in the
Munich Film Museum, but were unearthed only now) are apt to disrupt
24 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

the prevailing image of Pabst as the “Neue Sachlichkeit director”. It is as
if these films had never been made, and nothing will change until they
are rediscovered one day. Perhaps we will then have to reject them as
failures, but for the moment we can still look forward to them.
The camera negatives of all Pabst’s films of the German period considered
to be “classics”, Der Schatz, Die freudlose Gasse, Geheimnisse einer
Seele, Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney, Die Büchse der Pandora, Die weiße Hölle
vom Piz Palü (co-directed with Arnold Fanck), Tagebuch einer Verlorenen,
Westfront 1918, Kameradschaft, and Herrin von Atlantis have been lost.
That is to say we still do not know where they are and have good reason
to fear that under some circumstances or other they have been
destroyed. The camera negative of Die 3-Groschen-Oper has survived, but
only the German version; also large parts of the camera negative of
Abwege, a film which led a shadowy existence until rediscovered and
completed by Enno Patalas and which is not even mentioned in most of
the literature on Pabst. It has simply not been seen by anyone, although
at least the cinematheques in Berlin (East), Brussels, Prague, and
Moscow possessed acceptable copy material of the existing negative fragments.
There are contemporary nitrate copies: Der Schatz (tinted, with Czech
titles, but so far only duplicated in black and white); of Die freudlose
Gasse (however, none corresponding in the slightest to the original version);
of Kameradschaft (various incomplete versions, or versions
designed for the foreign market, of which some provided the basis for a
reconstruction by the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv in 1989); of Herrin von
Atlantis (two copies held by the Reichsfilmarchiv in differing states of
completeness were recently combined and reprinted by the
Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv); of Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (the cutting
order, insert title texts, and origin of the Reichsfilmarchiv copy are dubious.
An attempt at reconstruction by the Bundesarchiv has been undertaken
in collaboration with the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek). Very
strange fragments (to some extent probably out-takes) of Tagebuch einer
Verlorenen were found in the Pereda Collection at the Montevideo
Cinematheque and have now been integrated into the nitrate material
found in Paris and Brussels in preparation of the already mentioned
reconstruction. But that is all - in other words, there are really no “originals”
at all any more.
As we know, copies of all the titles mentioned are nevertheless available
on safety film and are in circulation. Where do they come from? They
are the fruit of exchanges, sales, and inheritances among archives, collectors
and changing holders of rights, and repeated printings, often involving
changes in the films that can no longer be reconstructed and which
cannot therefore be rectified. In many cases, however, the origins of the
material can be established by uniting data from various archives; comparing
perforation markings or other traces inscribed in the material
itself permit the copying history to be reconstructed. This allows the best
exhibition material to be selected and other footage of the same content
to be rejected. However, what cannot for the moment be remedied is
25 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Conclusions au sujet de la
Rétrospective G.W. Pabst, Berlin 1997.
Une rétrospective, telle que nous la
concevons, devrait offrir ce que une autre
salle de cinéma ou la télévision n’offrent pas.
Une telle rétrospective, lorsqu’elle est
organisée par les cinémathèques, offre, de
surcroît, de nombreuses surprises pour les
historiens et les restaurateurs de films.
La rétrospective Pabst dont il est question ici
a été rendue possible grâce à la participation
de nombreux partenaires d’autres archives,
à l’effort commun de recherche, de
préservation et de restauration des
originaux. L’une des surprises - et non des
moindres - fut cependant de découvrir que
l’œuvre d’un cinéaste classique comme
Pabst, que tout le monde croit connaître, ne
peut être considéré comme ayant survécu
dans sa forme originelle et complète. Plus de
la moitié des titres projetés ont été annoncé
comme des « restaurations » ou des
« reconstructions ». Deux films, Grafin
Donelli et Man spielt nicht mit der Liebe
doivent être considérés définitivement ( ?)
comme perdus. Les négatifs de caméra
originaux de la période allemande semblent
être perdus. En revanche, les œuvres de la
période américaine 1933-36 sont
extrêmement bien préservées. Les périodes
françaises 1932-33 et 1936-39 semblent
également avoir mieux survécu. Il reste
beaucoup de travail pour les chercheurs et
les historiens

Conclusiones luego de la retrospectiva
G.W. Pabst, Berlin 1997.
Una retrospectiva, tal como la concebimos,
debería ofrecer lo que otra sala de
exhibición o la televisión no pueden ofrecer.
En todo caso, organizada por cinematecas,
ofrece sorpresas tanto para los historiadores
que para los restauradores de películas.
La retrospectiva Pabst ha sido posible
gracias a la participación de numerosas
colaboraciones de otros archivos, a un
esfuerzo común de investigación, de
preservación de los originales y finalmente
de reconstituciones. Una de las mayores
sorpresas fue que las mismas obras de un
director considerado como un clásico, que
todo el mundo cree conocer, no pueden ser
consideradas como habiendo sobrevivido en
su forma definitiva y completa. Más de la
mitad de los títulos programados fueron
anunciados como « restauraciones » o
« reconstituciones ». Dos películas, Grafin
Donelli y Man spielt nicht mit der Liebe,
deben ser consideradas como perdidas. Los
negativos de cámara originales del período
alemán están perdidos. En cambio, las obras
del período americano 1933-36 están bien
conservadas. También ocurre con los
períodos franceses 1932-33 y 1936-39.
Queda mucho trabajo para los
investigadores y los historiadores...
damage to the source material that has been printed into the existing
materials from earlier generations: insertions, scratching, blurring due to
bad printing. There are limits to correcting arbitrary changes to the
material: modifications to the text of insert titles can be reversed only if
the script or censor’s certificate have survived and supply the correct
wording. Text changes in sound films (they also occur) can never be corrected.
Cut scenes can be saved only if there is another copy still containing
the footage removed, but what is to be done if this is not the
case? Even after the retrospective, Pabst’s German period remains an area
in which film historians have a great deal of work before them.
From 1933 to 1936 Pabst worked in the United States. He was able to
complete only one film at the beginning of his stay under adverse circumstances:
A Modern Hero. Precisely this film, which Pabst himself
probably did not much like, is the best preserved. The original negative
has been deposited by the holder in the Library of Congress, a fine grain
master and printable dupe negative - produced by all the rules of the art
- are stored separately in Kansas and California. My question as to what
was to happen with the original nitrate material (which in Germany is
often still destroyed after copying) I received a clear answer: “This will
never be destroyed (by us, anyway) unless it decomposes and becomes
dangerous.”
The French period (1932/33 and 1936-39). The situation here is somewhat
better. Original negatives of the following titles have survived: Don
Quichotte (not preserved, but available in a single copy which is in our
archive collection); Mademoiselle Docteur (repatriated and completed on
the occasion of the retrospective); Le Drame de Shanghai (preserved as a
lavender and available on video, but there are no new release prints, it
seems); Jeunes filles en détresse (restored and available). There is still only
a damaged nitrate print of Du haut en bas and (technically obsolescent)
preservation material based on this - perhaps one of the reasons why this
film has hitherto been so little known and largely underestimated.
The two German films from the forties, Komödianten and Paracelsus, the
production of which did Pabst’s reputation permanent damage, have survived
in surprisingly good condition thanks to the work of the Murnau
Foundation and the Federal Archive, even though the original negatives
and the nitrate intermediate material produced from them no longer
exist. Most of Pabst’s German post-war films have survived well. The
original negatives, most already on safety film, still exist and form the
basis for the preservation package in the Federal Archive. A curiosity
among the later Pabst films is the Austrian title, Geheimnisvolle Tiefe, long
believed to have been lost. This film was restored by the Cinémathèque
Française on the basis of two nitrate copies (with French subtitles),
which had at some time found their way into their archive from the very
limited distribution in Alsace and were rediscovered some years ago. It
would be advantageous if preservation prints of Der Prozeß were to be
made - the original negative still exists as well as copies in various
archives, but none of them meet modern picture and sound standards.
People interested in finding out about the sometimes complicated mater-
26 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

ial situation of individual Pabst films are invited to enquire (where possible
in writing). We do not, of course, have the space to provide all information
on locations and copying history (which has to some extent been
provided on a confidential basis). Information on the origin and production
of the copies actually exhibited at the retrospective (which are currently
the best ones) is contained in the 54 programme sheets compiled
by Gabriele Jatho for the retrospective, which are available from the
Kinemathek for DM 15.
The Pabst retrospective has also left some traces in the film archive of
Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek. New 35 mm prints of the following titles
have been made and (partly subject to right-holders’ approval) are available:
Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (restored version of 1929), Don
Quichotte (French original version of 1933), Du haut en bas (French with
German subtitles), A Modern Hero (American original version),
Mademoiselle Docteur (restored version of 1937, French), Duell mit dem
Tod (original version of 1949). Also available are Westfront 1918 (1988
print, new restoration pending).
Many FIAF members have recently been engaged by new technologies
for the restoration of film, which seem to offer a range of new tools for
archivists. Rather than displacing the traditional concerns of archivists
and curators, however, the prospect of greater power over the image has
contributed to a thorough-going re-examination of the traditional values
and practices of restoration. The ARCHIMEDIA colloquium of last
November featured important interventions by Dominique Païni and
Gian Luca Farinelli. And this year’s FIAF Congress symposium contained
many reflections on archival practice in the wake of ARCHIMEDIA. The
historical reflection of our Munich colleague Enno Patalas, which is
being presented here in slightly modified form, gives us an evolutionary
account of an experience that parallels that of some of the other regional
archives and which stands in contradistinction to the development of the
autonomous national archives.
One of the most important points made by Patalas (who cites Païni’s
expression of the same motive) is the idea that we are saving not simply
physical material, but cinema’s imaginary. This imaginary is a complex
system which includes the film (as an object, as a part of a world of such
objects), the conditions and context of its presentation, and the spectators.
Peter Von Bagh’s article on the Cinema Ritrovato event in Bologna
last year is both a report on the festival, and an example of the cinephilia
which completes the cycle of preservation by carrying it through the
imaginary phase. Peter Von Bagh, one of FIAF’s ‘first spectators’, incarnates
traditional cinephilia as it exists as a resource for film preservation
and film culture.
Michael Friend
27 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Restoration(s) /
Restauration(s)

On “Wild” Film Restoration, or Running
a Minor Cinematheque*
*This is a slightly modified version of the
address that was delivered at the
Symposium on Restoration: Works of Art as
a Common Theme Between Film Archives
and Other Cultural Institutions - Ethical
Problems of Restoration of Different Art
Forms, 54th FIAF Congress, Prague,
April 25, 1998
Enno Patalas
I am very grateful to Vladimír Opela for his kind invitation. Initially I
only wanted his permission to attend this event as an auditor, which he
kindly granted; but he said he would invite me, if I would be ready to
“transfer to the delegates your experience.» I thought I could do this
during one of the discussions, but Mr. Opela insisted I deliver an address
at the symposium. So here I am, and now I am supposed to talk on
something I wanted to learn about.
Three years after having retired from the Munich Filmmuseum, I began
to get interested in reflecting critically on my work at the Filmmuseum.
When I heard about the Archimedia seminar in Paris last November,
«The Methodology and Aesthetics of Restoration: Cinema and the Other
Arts,» I went there, and found myself confronted with questions the
urgency of which I had been feeling for some time. I quote from Gian
Luca Farinelli’s presentation of the first day: «Finally, the necessarily
hasty decision-making and improvised restoration activity » - that is
what I practiced and I would call “wild” film restoration - «are making
way for a practice founded on criteria and philological selections which
are both well-considered and thoroughly documented.” And Dominique
Païni, (presenting the Archimedia program on «Methodology and
Aesthetics of Restoration») noted that after an initial phase of film
restoration “dictated by urgent chemical criteria” and a secondary step
“that saw the rise of more aesthetic and historical considerations,» film
restoration is now entering a phase where “new issues [are] taking centre
stage, the ethical, aesthetic and philological questions”.
As you know, the Munich Filmmuseum is a secondary instition, the cinema
department of a municipal museum, and nothing you would compare
to an autonomous national film archive. When I took over from
Rudolf Joseph in 1973, there was very little money, practically no collection,
no technical equipment, an inadequate provisional screening room
with wooden walls, and just three people, including me. At the Moscow
FIAF Congress that year, we applied for the status of observer and we
were denied. Six years later we were admitted as an associate, and
Munich became a provisional member only last year.
All the same, FIAF meetings have been a very fruitful experience for me
- not the general assemblies, but meeting people at breakfast, or at night
in a bar. At the Moscow congress I met Viktor Privato and Vladimir
Dmitriev and we agreed on an exchange Soviet “classics» for new West
German films, that later was extended to films other than Soviet “classics”,
especially German films that we were interested in showing in
Munich. That’s how our collection in Munich started.
28 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

I remember Vladimir Pogacic, then director of the Yugoslavian film
archive, at breakfast in Ottawa, in 1974, where he told me about an
entirely unknown film he had once seen mentioned once in a Russian
magazine: the full length Sovcolor documentary on Stalin’s funeral, by
Kopalin, Alexandrov, Gerassimov, Chiaureli and Romm. This was The
Great Goodbye (Velikie proshchainie). Twenty years later I got a beautiful
colour print of it from Krasnogorsk, the Photo and Film Documentary
Archive, and the film had what was probably its first public screening
during our «Cinema of the Dictators” program. I remember Peter von
Bagh in Turin, 1975, telling me about a print of Leni Riefenstahl’s Tag der
Freiheit he had seen at the Pacific Film Archive (the “most perverse Nazi
film,» he had ever seen); a film the filmmaker herself believed to be lost.
What Peter had seen in Berkeley proved to be (when we got access to it
through Tom Luddy, from David Shepard, then still in Davenport, Iowa)
reels one and three of the film. Later I realised that the GDR State
Archive had reels one and two, so I contacted Wolfgang Klaue and we
brought together all three sections of Tag der Freiheit. I remember Jerzy
Toeplitz, telling me about one shot of Lenin with Karl Radek, from 1920.
During the Stalinist era, when Radek had become a non-person, the film
had been retouched, covered by a greyish blur; I had to wait until 1989
to find the shot, unretouched, in a print of Vertov’ s Leninskaia
Kinopravda, again in Krasnogorsk. This print, with all the shots of Radek,
Sinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, missing in the ‘pictorially superior’
Gosfilmofond print, was the basis of our restoration (only the original
tinting is still missing). I discovered the retouched version of the shot,
the one Toeplitz had told me about, at Gosfilmofond, in that remarkable
Stalinist documentary by Mikhail Romm, VL, Lenin.
Originally I had no intention of collecting, not to mention restoring
German films of the twenties, as this was the task of our national
archives. I wanted to collect contemporary West German cinema, the
then “New German Cinema”, the “Munich School», films by people I
knew, Straub, Kluge, Schroeter, Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog...and
Hellmuth Costard, and Vlado Kristl, and later on Herbert Achternbusch.
and Romuald Karmakar, and I was able to do this. I also wanted to collect
foreign films - films I was eager to show again and again.
But then I realised that for a “Weimar Cinema” season our archives in
nine out of ten cases, when we had a print at all, it was incomplete,
poorly duped, with foreign language intertitles or re-translated ones;
often these were sound versions of silent films, with one fifth of the picture
cut off, and almost always 16mm copies.
Today I think somebody should look systematically for the fifties versions
of German films of the twenties, those poor 16mm prints with
recorded piano accompaniment, to be screened in fast motion (that is,
sound speed), as we saw them for the first time. Or make available again
Siegfrieds Tod, the 1933 “heroified” sound version of Siegfried, part one of
Nibelungen, UFA’s present to the new Reich’s chancellor. These versions
belong to the history of these films as much as their supposed “original”
versions. Dubbed versions, mutilated and falsified versions should be
29 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

collected for study, like the ‘denazified’ adaptations of Nazi films from
Adenauer’s time, as well as the versions of American films of the same
period (whose explicitly anti-nazi content was suppressed after the war)
such as Casablanca and Notorious. Where are these prints now?
I never wanted to become an archivist, and never regarded myself as a
conservator. I was a critic, who became a curator and as a curator
remained a critic. Composing a program, let us say, Gesamtkunstwerk
Stalin, or Wiener Söhne (Viennese Sons), or Drei Volksschauspieler (three
popular actors - a program that compared Toto, Will Rogers and Hans
Moser) was not, to my way of thinking, very different from writing about
such subjects. To quote Dominique Païni again: “Programmer, c’est
écrire, avec les oeuvres des autres, faire ‘parler les films’ plutôt que ‘parler
du cinéma’.
The first sentence of the first issue of Filmkritik (January 1957), the magazine
I edited during the sixties, quoted Walter Benjamin: “The audience
must constantly be put oin the wrong and yet always feel itself represented
by the critic.” This, I believe, is not a bad motto also for museum
programming. We all know archivists who never feel the desire to
exhibit their films, and we know people working at cinematheques who
rarely attend their screenings. But I think a good film archivist should be
like a good filmmaker, who will always regard himself as his first spectator
- as Henri Langlois did, according to Païni.
I also gained a lot from seeing films we were working on with an audience.
Not only have our audiences helped us with objects they may have
donated (a screenplay, a program booklet, a still), but sometimes just
their advice and criticism was valuable. I also found it much easier to
recognize the faulty editing of a sequence or misplaced title when I saw
the film with an audience rather than screening it alone in our theatre
(or viewing it on the editing table).
I have always tried to make the audience an accomplice in our activities.
Each print we got from Moscow or Milan or Montevideo was screened
first in its native condition. I would explain its particularities to the audience,
the special characteristics of a foreign version, a “corrupted” print,
the differences and errors and ellipses that distribution or deterioration
had visited upon the film. While the audience saw foreign language
intertitles on the screen I read to them the original German titles and
occasionally told them how they should imagine absent tints and tones.
Some films we presented again and again, to the same audiences, as the
versions evolved (with missing footage restored, German intertitles
remade, original colours reproduced, an original score performed). This
was part of the pleasure I took in my work.
Even before I began to work on the prints, I realized that something
should be done about screening facilities. We outfitted our room with
full gauge, variable speed projection (with a three blade shutter to avoid
flickering - still is rare in archive theatres), with aperture plates to
accommodate all of the historical formats, from the almost square size
projection formats of silent films and early sound films (Fritz Lang’s M
30 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

for instance) to the original Cinemascope format for films made with
four channel sound (such as Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes, a mint print of
which we got from the editor of the film - a print which was kept under
the editor’s bed for twenty years and now finally, with financial assistance
from Martin Scorsese, may be preserved) and Dolby SR, for Godard’s
Allemagne Neuf Zero - to mention just a few films I felt we should show
in a program to be called Alles, alles über Deutschland.
So, my answer to the question Païni asked at the Archimedia seminar:
«Que restaure-t-on: une pellicule ou un spectacle, autrement dit, un
objet ou une relation imaginaire?» always would have been: the spectacle,
the imaginary relation.
When we were offered the opportunity to design a new cinema, I
remembered what I had heard about Jonas Mekas’ and Peter Kubelka’s
first Anthology Archive cinema in New York. I liked the idea of having
black walls, so that nothing would reflect but the silvery white rectangle
of the screen, sharply limited by a movable mask. That theatre, that
black box filled with perfect sound (recorded or live), or tense silence
(created by the acoustics of a hall especially designed for that effect) has
been a source of pleasure for me at least as intense as that of the restored
prints of Nosferatu, Metropolis or Sumurun.
We collected films solely because we wanted to show them; rarely have I
shown a film I wouldn’t have wanted to see myself. I have always
wanted to share with an audience my interest and pleasure, not only in
“good films”, of course, but also in characteristically bad, dangerous,
nasty ones, films often not necessarily “politically correct”, but that
reflected something interesting about society, that played a role in history
and politics. We showed documentaries (and amateur films too), dealing
with contemporary dance, art, architecture, and of course with Munich,
such as the notorious Hauptstadt der Bewegung (The Capital of the
Movement), as Hitler had baptised our city.
The fact that we had to leave preservation to others sometimes led,
through defective communication and our lack of expertise, to bad
results, such as the case of Joe May’s Das indische Grabmal. It’s my belief
that the main source of film restoration problems and shortcoming in
Germany lies in the separation of archival work and programming, in the
fact that these activities are practiced by different people, and by different
institutions, often geographically separated.
Our «wild» archival practice began as a rather innocent comparison of
film «texts.» As we drew together film resources from diverse sources in
order to assemble an exhibition, we began to make discoveries. We realized
that the dupe of a scratchy print of Die freudlose Gasse we got from
Gosfilmofond (from a Russian release print of the twenties) contained
pieces that were missing in the better-looking print of the British release
version that we secured from London, while image quality was best in
the shortest print, the French version we obtained from Paris. So we
began our practice of comparison, and of creating a new copy by splic-
31 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

ing the best remaining material from all the available sources to create
the most complete version of a given film.
Comparing two versions of Metropolis, one from Moscow and another
one from London, we observed, that in one shot John Fredersen left the
room with his head up (in the Moscow print), and in the other (the
London print) with his head down. In the Moscow print, a certain segment
consisted of one long shot, while in the London print, the segment
was broken into three short ones. We later found that the London print
had been duped from MOMA’s material in New York, which derived
from the UFA negative they received in 1937. And the Moscow print,
the longest one we were able to find, was based on the American
(Paramount) version (which, as Mr. Dmitriev told me recently “has been
preserved at Gosfilmofond for a long time”). A feature of the archival
world which I find particularly fascinating is the complicated way films
traveled between archives before, during and after the war. Some of this
traffic is an important part of FIAF’s still unwritten history, which will
have to include a comprehensive account of the relations between the
Cinémathèque Française, MOMA and the Reichsfilmarchiv, and especially
between Henri Langlois, Iris Barry and Frank Hensel.
There is still an aspect of chance in the ways we come upon the diaspora
of elements for a film like Metropolis. I learned through Kenneth Anger
(whose films we had shown to enthusiastic audiences at the
Filmmuseum) of another Metropolis print in Australia. A collector in
Melbourne, Harry Davidson, had shown Kenneth his print of Metropolis,
which contained some unique shots and sequences (which until then I
hadn’t been able to locate in any other source). When Harry Davidson
died, the Canberra archive acquired his collection and made what they
thought was an inferior duplicate negative which they donated to our
Filmmuseum. As it turned out, the quality was very good, and we used
it to further extend our reconstruction of the film.
We received another negative of Metropolis as a gift from MoMA. This
was the nitrate negative that MOMA had obtained from UFA in 1937. At
this time, MoMA was able to fund the preservation of its nitrate material
on the film (optically the best in the world, a second generation dupe
neg of the German version) by making a duplicate available to Moroder,
who wanted access to the highest quality material for his project. Once
MoMA had created its safety fine grain master, they did not need the
nitrate negative any longer, and so that element was able to come to us
in Munich.
In the later sixties, the GDR state archive had attempted to restore
Metropolis. When they had gone as far as they could on the film, they
admitted that the work was still incomplete, but that one could probably
go further unless written source material like the scenario would be
found. This discovery occurred in the seventies, when we got access to a
copy of the scenario kept by Huppertz, the composer (which was
acquired by the Berlin Kinemathek), along with his score containing
more than one thousand cues for the conductor, and the German censorship
cards. Such items - scenarios, scores, censorship cards - along
32 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

with other non-film materials (reviews, program booklets and novels
based on films, in which dialogue sometimes proved to follow the film’s
intertitles) have become important secondary sources that we learned to
seek out and to use as guides in our restoration work. What I came to
know about film restoration was not derived from manuals, which did
not exist, but rather was the result of experimentation, bricolage, mistakes
and correcting revisions.
And it’s important to realize that our mentors of the forties and fifties,
Langlois, Leyda, Jacobs, Eisner, Kracauer, didn’t just discover the films of
the twenties and thirties, they in a sense invented them for us, especially
the “Weimar Cinema.” Thomas Elsaesser argues that this history “from
Caligari to Hitler,” constructed by Kracauer, “is itself an expressionist
drama...The films reflect German history, because this history has been
narrated in terms and categories derived from the films.» While the revisionists
among professors for cinema studies struggle with the heritage of
Eisner and Kracauer, curators and restorators have to contend with that
of Langlois - and Iris Barry, Jacques Ledoux, Gerhard Lamprecht and
others - the curators who found, preserved and screened these films,
preserved and manipulated them, commented on them, and left them to
our generation which has learned to know and to love them as they have
come down to us, shaped by the first great generation of cinema
archivists.
I quote from Jacques Rivette’s report on a visit - February 15, 1956 - to
the Cinémathèque: “This evening, Fritz Lang’s Nibelungen: after a very
honorable print of Siegfried’s Death, whose only fault was to be projected
at twenty-four frames.... there was Kriemhild’s Revenge, which I must
admit never having seen until now, except those shattering Pathé-Baby
reels. But now we can contemplate a very beautiful 35mm version,
recently copied (probably from the original negative), but the fragments
of which have not been restored to their logical order. This provoked
some of the audience, who had undoubtedly come to adore the construction
of Thea von Harbou’s script...As if all of Lang’s shots, whether
in order or not. were not of an uncommon splendour. Here’s a real ‘story
of sound and fury,» and the disorder [of montage] ultimately only contributes
to it.» Rivettes’s fixation on mise-en-scène, the disdain for narration,
script construction, and montage are characteristic of a certain
strain of French cinephilia in the fifties.
Three aspects connected with our restoration of films of the twenties
(and not only the German ones) still require more theoretical elaboration,
practical understanding and broader discussion and criticism: intertitles,
colour and music.
Intertitles for a long time were regarded by the cinephiles as an uncinematic
relic of literature in films. I’m glad to hear that a seminar on intertitles
took place recently in Udine. As you know, German filmmakers
like Carl Mayer, Lupu Pick, Robison and Murnau proclaimed: “the ideal
film has no titles.” But at the same time, these film-makers and others
were trying to assimilate titles into the stream of moving pictures, to
integrate them seamlessly with the narration, rhythm and style of their
33 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

films. They tried to distance themselves from traditional, bourgeois high
culture, turning to popular, anonymous, collective forms of creation, and
to free language and script from their cultural literary heritage. The captions
of German films of the early twenties, the inflation period, the
German Lubitsch films, early Langs and Murnaus, all bear witness to this
in different ways. Through our restoration work, we have come to
understand the creation of intertitles as a focus of specific aesthetic interest
in the German cinema of the twenties. The original intertitles for
Caligari, which had survived only in one 16mm print preserved by
Gerhard Lamprecht, founder of the Berlin Kinemathek, had been
designed by Hermann Warm, the ones for Nosferatu by Albin Grau, the
ones for Der Golem by Hans Poelzig.
Langlois is said, perhaps unjustly, to have cut intertitles from his prints
and have them replaced by crosses but it seems certain that he didn’t
devote any particular effort to finding and restoring them. However,
Lotte Eisner did. Fritz Lang had told her about the very deliberate work
of creating titles for his films and others, and she even provides some of
the titles in verse and rhyme for Der müde Tod in her book on Lang. It
was Lotte who asked me to look for the titles of Nosferatu as well as of
Der müde Tod. The titles for Der müde Tod were believed to be lost, since
already before the war the Reichsfilmarchiv had to ask MOMA for a
print. Eventually, we were to find these titles (in the form of flash titles)
in a print from Gosfilmofond, based it seems on a negative imported
from Germany in the twenties. Beautifully written, the titles were in different
graphic styles for the framing story and each of the three episodes
- Gothic letters for the framing story, pseudo Arabian, Chinese and
Renaissance titles for the respective episodes.
In East Berlin, I was able to see a print of Nosferatu that Manfred
Lichtenstein referred to as their “bad print” and which he hesitated to
show me. It certainly was a bad print, but it had many of the original
intertitles and samples of all kinds of captions the film originally contained:
dialogue titles, the vampire book, the ship’s log book, the chronicle
that comments the story of the film - signed with three crosses, like
graveyard crosses (and not by a learned historian with name and surname
as in the French version, freed of all typically German ambiguities).
As we tried to duplicate defective intertitles, like the scratchy ones in
Nosferatu or those from the 16mm print of Caligari, we realized that,
when we just stretch-printed a single frame, the titles looked static and
lifeless. It was necessary to reproduce and reshoot the titles frame by
frame, so that the grain would change and vibrate as it does in the original
film. The captions became moving pictures.
We generally faked the graphic design of missing titles only, when we felt
sure that we knew how they originally looked. Here I am only touching
a problem that should become a subject for further discussion on film
restoration in FIAF: what to do with missing captions and inserts? Are
we allowed to try to imitate them “in the style of the time?” That is, if we
know the design of a company’s trademark from one film, are we
34 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

allowed to use it to fake the title’s framework of another film produced
by the same company? We too occasionally did that, but today I think
it’s a mistake, and that one should find methods for quoting a missing
text or graphic, in a way that shows, by graphic means (not by adding
words) that a letter, a page of a book or some other graphic insert was
known to be present, and that the existing graphic is a stand-in, a latter
day reconstruction which only approximates the original.
It is, I am convinced, an important task for future film restoration, to
develop an “art of quoting”, of citing, in order to deal with lacunae, to
indicate what’s missing and expose what we know about it, without
doing harm to the stylistic integrity of a film or concealing the lacuna.
I am very much against introducing production stills to represent a missing
sequence. This practice arrests the flow of the moving picture.
Similarly I’m also against wordy descriptions of missing shots, as in the
MoMA restoration of Way Down East - a few black frames to mark the
spot, I think, would have worked better. Additional titles should
describe, in abbreviated fashion, the content of missing sequences. I
would not put a title into a film that was meant to be without titles. We
have recently seen the results of such an interpolation in Bologna with a
print of Schatten (Warning Shadows). I expect that further examination of
these issues will lead FIAF into a debate over “visible” versus “invisible”
restoration in film preservation, in much the same way that this antagonism
has developed in the theory and practice in the restoration of
paintings and sculptures.
The resistance among traditional cinephiles to recolourisation is at least
as strong as resistance to the reintroduction of intertitles. Colour in silent
films would have been just “un grelot qui accompagne le trot du cheval,”
the ringing of the bells that accompany a trotting horse, Jacques Ledoux
told Eric de Kuyper. The great cinematic achievements of the thirties and
the forties (the great era of black and white cinematography), occlude
the memory of the widespread practice of tinting and toning in the teens
and twenties. Film archives have generally conserved the black and
white nitrate negatives or produced black and white safety negatives
from tinted nitrate prints. There is a parallel in sculpture restoration,
where, in the 19th century, colourful sculptures in churches were
painted white. There is a strong bourgeois (and misogynist) prejudice
behind this thinking, expressed by Charles Blanc in 1867, when he
called black and white drawing “the male sex of the art” and colour “the
female sex”, and warned that if one day black and white drawing would
no longer be dominant over colour painting, art would be lost, “comme
l’humanité fut perdue par Eve”.
One by one, colour versions of German silent films have shown up during
the last two decades. Caligari twice in Montevideo, Genuine in
Toulouse and Lausanne, Schatten in Paris and Milan, Der Golem in Milan,
Der brennende Acker and Finanzen des Grossherzogs, early Langs in
Amsterdam and Sao Paulo. Film by film we are rediscovering the chromatism
of the German cinema of the twenties. Contemporary audiences
first met cinema bunt, colourful; only gradually out of the coloured
35 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

prints, thanks to better developing and printing methods, emerged the
graphic - photographic - nature of the film image emphatically cultivated
by German film architects, costume and make-up designers, cameramen
and directors. Von Morgens bis Mitternachts, in 1920, was praised for
being “the first German black and white film”. The second half of the
twenties saw films more decently tinted (and not toned at all) and more
black and white prints, but till the end of the decade black and white
defined itself only in contradistinction to colour tinting.
Little we know about the contribution of filmmakers to the process of
colouring their films. In Murnau’s scenarios I only found one hint, in
that for Schloss Vogelöd, he noted: “Dream sequences, leave them black
and white”. Generally, it seems, authors left the decision on colour to
specialists. Colour belonged to the industrial aspect of cinema, connected
films to mass culture, and also defined the artistically ambitious
ones.
For some years, archives have produced safety negatives on colour stock
from tinted and/or toned nitrate positives. The result in many cases was
that, instead of a picture in shades of black-and-white, sepia or blue
tones on a monochrome-tinted ground, the resulting images were many
different shades of colour. Instead of (for example) a black-and-white
image on a stable yellow ground, the photographic colour image wavers
between bright yellow and dark brown with orange and reddish brown
overtones. There is no stable black, no stable yellow ground. The overall
result suggests the rich and complicated chromatism of a painting rather
than the stark, stylized graphic values of a print that was the goal of tinting
and toning in the early cinema, as cited by Urban Gad.
Only with the advent of the printing method developed by Noel Desmet
in Brussels and practiced first there and in Bologna, has the problem
been brought nearer to an acceptable solution. I must admit I am not
very familiar with the few examples of German films recolourised in
Prague using the old methods of tinting in a bath. So the Bologna
Nosferatu, Golem and Genuine and the Brussels Caligari were the first
safety prints of German twenties films that looked to me like the wood
cut prints which inspired the expressionists, and they make evident why
contemporaries, in spite of tinting, praised the black and white quality of
their photography.
Understandably, some cinephiles of the post-war generation want to go
on seeing Caligari and Nosferatu as they have learned to know and to
love them, black and white, and the French Nosferatu with their titles
like the one Breton raved about: «Et quand il fut de l’autre côté du pont,
les fantômes vinrent à sa rencontre.”
And, of course, without musical accompaniment. But our restored original
titles of Nibelungen and Metropolis gave credit to the composer
Gottfried Huppertz, those of Nosferatu to Hans Erdmann. And Eisenstein
called Potemkin his first sound film, because of the music by Edmund
Meisel. Bringing back music to silent films as a part of their restoration is
another subject that deserves more reflection than it has until quite
36 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

ecently received. I’m glad that Archimedia will dedicate another seminar,
in July in Bologna, to that subject. I’ve come to regard Aljoscha
Zimmermann, the composer and pianist with whom I have been working,
as a collaborator in the restoration of films as important as Gerhard
Ullmann and Klaus Volkmer, who for years worked with me at the
Steenbeck.
On the other hand, musicians accompanying silent films, even when
they referred to original scores, have often done more harm than good.
For example, the accompanist for Nosferatu who mechanically repeated
Erdmann’s Romantisch-phantastische Suite twice - as it is only half as long
as the film - instead of unfolding its motives, adapting them by a sensitive
arrangement to the film. In a different version, exactly this has been
done with the stunning effect, so that the music and tinting correspond
with each other, and one gets a sense of the essential art of scoring silent
film.
When we were asked, ten years ago, to provide a print of Battleship
Potemkin for a tour of an orchestra, conducted by David Shallon (who
wanted to perform Meisel’s score), we ran into a couple of problems.
Meisel had written his score for the German version of the film, which
doesn’t exist anymore. We had the censorship cards, and our beautiful
Gosfilmofond print corresponded with the German version, as did a
British release print, preserved in London (also based not on the Russian
but on the German version), edited by Piel Jutzi. Thus, it is possible to
restore the German version, and one day the German archives should do
this. But then, the German version had been criticised severely and justly
by Eisenstein himself, not only for the censorship cuts, but also because
Jutzi had destroyed the rigorous five act construction of the film and
changed it into six, reformulated credits and intertitles, and changed the
order of shots and sequences. This was our problem: we only had
authentic music which corresponded to the German version that
Eisenstein repudiated, and we wanted to present his version of the film.
Ultimately, we decided to look for the missing shots in order to recreate
a version as close as possible to Eisenstein’s original montage. We found
some shots preserved in the London print and others in a print MOMA
had received from Jay Leyda (who had brought it from Moscow); we
reintegrated the missing shot and re-edited everything to conform to
Eisenstein’s version, and then we had the music re-arranged to accommodate
the restored Russian Potemkin of 1925. The resulting print was
screened with music for enthusiastic audiences in Frankfort, Cologne,
Munich, and Strasbourg, who applauded frenetically the rising of the -
hand-coloured! - red flag. The print and the performance did not reproduce
any past event, but presented a new montage of different attractions,
picture and sound, all of them, in one way or another, authentic,
in accordance with the intentions of the author, but not a reproduction.
This event only reinforced my conviction that the process of presenting
an old film to new audiences has a lot in common with the older curatorial
activities such as restoration of art works and textual editing.
Certainly, many of the same kinds of historical and technical attention
37 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

are required, from the ‘philological’ tracing of the origins of the different
versions, to the understanding of the significance of these versions
through examination of material in the paper archives, to the creative
work necessary to recreate an appropriate if not ‘authentic original’ musical
performance. But also, the process of restoration and presentation of
a restored silent film bears comparison with textual editing and then theatrical
performance of a literary work, which requires adjustments and a
certain amount of latitude in presentation, always guided of course by a
strong awareness of the elements of original presentation (technical form,
historical context, directorial intention, etc). Which brings me back to
one of my earlier points: we always have to think of the audience as a
part of the process, and perhaps we should not think of any restoration
as complete or successful until it has played to a real audience in a real
theatre.
My recent readings in the literature about modern art restoration and
textual critique and editing, inspired by the Paris Archimedia seminar,
have been stimulating and encouraging. Art restorators, I understand,
after a period in which they removed elements added through the centuries
to an antique sculpture, are now putting them back, marking
them as such, as interpretations of a later periods. You can read an old
film, through its different versions, like a palimpsest, as Giorgio Bertellini
has proposed (in the special issue of Richard Koszarski’s Film History
edited by Paolo Cherchi Usai) doing with Metropolis. And you can invite
your audience to participate in the pleasure of reading that palimpsest,
reading the traces of older texts under the surface.
The restoration of a film should always be an open process, leaving time
and space for further ‘versions’ that will not necessarily make the earlier
ones obsolete. The objects we are dealing with are copies, but each one
is different from its model. Each print is a kind of ‘original,’ and each
performance is unique. So each restoration is an interpretation, a translation,
an explanation, a performance. If restorator and programmer act as
historians, they can resurrect a film in a genuine, truthful way. If they
don’t, they may give the film a youthful ‘make-up’ (“new splendor to old
movies” as last week’s German tv broadcast on Photoplay’s activities was
called), so that it may dance like the old man in Le Masque (the first
episode of Max Ophuls’ Le Plaisir) before he breaks down.
Restoring a film often resembles the long ride in an classical western
movie. You start with a well-defined aim: bringing the bandit to the
prison beyond the desert, or bringing a film back to its “original version”.
But then you begin to like your prisoner, in spite or even because
of his defects - so your intention, your ambition, your mission changes
during your long ride home, and the happy ending may become very
different from what you imagined in the beginning.
38 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

Miracolo di Bologna
Peter von Bagh
It’s Spring, and the planning for the 1998 edition of Bologna’s Cinema
Ritrovato is already well along, and I’m just wrapping up my report on
the wonder 1997 exhibition. Gian Luca Farinelli, Vittorio Martinelli,
Nicola Mazzanti, Mark-Paul Meyer and Ruud Visschedijk (that is, the
dual team of Bologna and Amsterdam) have provided us with a model of
creative cooperation among film archives. The miracle of Bologna’s retrospective
is not only the selection of films, but also its unique vision
which presents a unified program and provides a strong historical context
for rediscovering the original relations among films. For a long week
in July, the city of Bologna, from the Piazza Maggiore to the Cortile to
the Cinéma Lumière, becomes a laboratory for the meticulous and
extravagant presentation of silent film.
Eight days into the festival, it’s Friday evening at 10. We are seated outside,
in the Cortile, just off the Piazza Maggiore. As the lights go down,
we are shown Eugenio Perego’s Napoli e una canzione. Two guitarists
improvise an accompaniment drawn from Italian and Neapolitan standards
of the pre-war years. The film is virtually unknown to contemporary
cinema history, and yet it becomes something incredibly beautiful,
one of the most overwhelming experiences of popular cinema that I have
ever had. The story is naive, full of feeling, and surprisingly reminiscent
of Viaggio in Italia.
But this marvelous evening doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Not only have we
been watching films all week, but we have also been uniquely prepared
by Cinema Ritrovato’s three day symposium on silent cinema that preceded
the main exhibitions. The work of archivists and academics came
together in an unusually productive way, so that a concrete and coherent
view of early Italian film began to emerge from the misconceptions,
myths and memories about the silent era in Italy. The critical masterworks,
stars and genres and the characteristic styles of Italy’s formative
period of the motion picture began to take shape at the symposium. As
this work continues, it will be possible to restore the silent cinema of
Italy to its place in the history of visual culture.
Friday evening’s performance was for me the most exciting moment of a
festival that was continuously amazing and revelatory (I felt like singing
“I’m in heaven...” like Stanley Donen on Oscar night). There was the fantastic
early version of Pinocchio with Polidor, the slapstick from André
Deed, and the beautiful Monichelli film. We were able to see parts of I
topi grigi (1918), one of the great serials of the decade, and perhaps the
boldest example of Pastrone’s mise-en-scène, his Tigre reale of 1916. The
screening of Gabriellino D’Annunzio’s 1921 film Il nave was a revelation.
This strange example of cinema mythography, with its stylized sets, its
costumes and models, its bizarre narrative of cruelty and some wild
39 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

images reminiscent of Que Viva México!, adds to our understanding of
the complex cultural program of D’Annunzio, and to our appreciation of
the development of spectacle in the Italian cinema.
The week included an interesting didactic exercise by Eric de Kuiper,
which presented two different music score for La sposa del Nilo
(Guazzoni, 1911). This demonstration added a concrete experience to
the debate surrounding the issue of music for silent film, and while no
absolute conclusions were reached on the philosophical level, the screening
was revealing as to how much the music can change the reception
and meaning of a silent film.
The centerpiece of Bologna’s programming is a retrospective dedicated to
a great silent star. We have seen seasons dedicated to Valentino (1996)
and Garbo (1997), and this year will feature a Douglas Fairbanks retrospective.
If some of these films are among the most familiar in the silent
canon, Cinema Ritrovato nevertheless offers the possibility to see a large
body of work at one time, to evaluate the formation of acting styles or
the overall evolution of a great and charismatic screen presence. Each of
these retrospective has afforded revelations large and small which change
the received idea of these stars and their cinematic milieu. No matter
how much you think you “know” these films, seeing them together at
one time, in restored prints accompanied by music, with a living audience
and musical accompaniment, and in the context of other contemporary
films, will change your thinking and add to your understanding
of the great screen figures of the past, individually and as a part of the
greater whole of silent cinema. For the technician, these exercises
reveal the technical state of these films; for the academic, they add factual
detail to the figures of history. But there is another important function
of this programming emphasis on the great stars: this strategy
attracts a popular audience. These screenings thus provide a link
between the audience of cinema specialists and the local film-goers who
attend these evening screenings. The Bologenese have become a part of
the retrospective, a discriminating audience that broadens the experience
of film-going, takes it out of the classroom or the laboratory and forges a
link with living history. That audience is very important to those who are
trying to reconstruct cinema as a popular artform, and there are few
places in the world today where such an audience exists. They are one of
the reasons that the Cinema Ritrovato is much more than an academic
exercise. The Greta Garbo retrospective gave us a nearly comprehensive
look at one of the cinema’s great enigmas. Four films showed us
Garbo in the hands of European auteurs who were inspired by the Garbo
image. Stiller’s Gosta Berlings saga and Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse, are long
films screened in versions which were close to their original form. Today,
these films are seen for the most part in excerpts or heavily edited versions.
I felt that Die freudlose Gasse, which has been restored by Jan-
Christopher Horak, emerged as one of the greatest European films of all
time. In its restored form, we are able to see the full scope of Pabst’s figuration,
all of the complicated relations between morality, psychology and
40 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

economy at play in its representation of German from the point of view
of the street. The inspired use of Garbo and Asta Nielsen, among the
most treasured personas of the silent cinema, to reveal the cruel, dehumanizing
vicissitudes of modern German society seems both exhilarating
and risky, even today.
Only a ten-minute fragment of Sjostrom’s The Divine Woman remains
(and we have to thank Gosfilmofond for that); this is enough, however,
to show us facets of Garbo’s acting that extend beyond the stylized image
of the vamp which is the Garbo of popular memory. And a fourth film,
Jacques Feyder’s The Kiss (1929), is perhaps the only remaining
Hollywood film by a director not submissive to studio discipline and
style.
Nevertheless, the Hollywood films (with the exception of Love) were
magnificent from the first to the last. The whole of these films, from
Monta Bell’s curious and madly repetitive rondo The Torrent (1926), to
the ready-made Wild Orchids (1929) of Sidney Franklin, provides material
for reflection about the fabrication of a “product” (“Garbo.), and
about the charisma and resistance of the great actress who in half a
decade changed the cinema forever, and made her last silent film at
twenty four.
An in-depth study of Clarence Brown is long overdue. It’s easy to see
why a ‘company man’ like Clarence Brown gets marginalized in cinema
history, with its preference for auteurs and the overshadowing presence
of Garbo in the early films. But his later sound films (even the most
emotionally appealing ones such as The Human Comedy and Intruder in
the Dust) have attracted little interest. The stylistic approach and passionate,
desperate quality of his most famous silent work - The Eagle, Flesh
and the Devil, A Woman of Affairs, the miraculous The Last of the
Mohicans to which he contributed) should be enough to warrant a reexamination.
of his highly original talent. Brown clearly knows the secret
essence of melodrama intimately. In his silent Garbo films, he manages
to extract from generic scenes all the darkness, the emotional traps and
ambivalence that would resurface twenty years later in the noir films.
Garbo was not the only ‘star’ of the 1997 season in Bologna. Without
much pre-publicity, the organizers put together a strong program featuring
the fabulous emigrant tragedian - and comedian - Ivan Mosjoukine.
Several French and German films by Volkov were screened. Perhaps the
most intriguing of these, the acclaimed 1923 portrait of the English
actor, Kean, already suggests the sophistication of the Russian sense of
montage that will be valorized after the Revolution. The film seems to
grow more personal from scene to scene. By the end of the film, this
complex meditation on the fate of the actor, which culminates with
Kean’s interpretation of Hamlet, seems to foreshadow aspects of
Mosjoukine’s own sad life.
The other films, whether French or German, seem to carry the same
sense of passion that is meant to depict eternal qualities of the Russian
soul. Der weisse Teufel (1929) with its czarist Russia rebuilt with love and
41 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

care, tragic and already so distant, and Les ombres qui passent (1924) that
shows beautifully Mosjoukine’s amazing range as his Zelig-like character
handles all kinds of situations, from the milking of a cow to exhibiting all
the artificialities of a dandy. Then, there was the ‘usual’ bonus that we
have come to expect from the programmers of the festival: the extraordinary
Le sergeant X (Wladimir Strjewsky, 1931) a rare example of
Mosjoukine in a sound film. This foreign legion movie (which ironically
justifies his accent) uses Mosjoukine’s great silent era visage and his identification
as an emigrant and cultural nomad to create a resonant European
character between an enigmatic past and an anonymous death. The
narrative of the film is of course generically linked to Europe’s long historical
past, but is also modern, almost existential in its stress on the
deracinated central figure who moves from displacement to secular sacrifice.
Perhaps the most original programming concept this year (probably the
inspiration of Vittorio Martinelli, Bologna’s greatest link with the historical
culture of the cinema) was the presentations of the films of Mittel-
Europa. Most of these films, extremely rare and never seen in an
ensemble until Cinema Ritrovato, were products of the Russian diaspora,
and taken as a whole seemed to provide a catalog of stylistic experimentation
(especially in the use of sound and music), unusual qualities of
tone and mood, and a general psychology of distress and uncertainty.
This diverse group of filmmakers had very different careers. Anatol
Litwack (represented by Cette vieille canaille of 1933) became a studio
director in America. We saw two films each from Victor Trivas, Alexei
Granowsky, Alexandr Razumnyi, and Fedor 0zep. Victor Tourjansky,
(whose splendid Michel Strogoff was the best-known film of this series),
Fedor Ozep, and to a lesser extent Aleksandr Razoumnyi (who evidently
returned to the Soviet Union to make several more films) all continued to
have cinema careers. Other figures in this group remain obscure.
The Trivas double bill consisted of the silent Aufruhr des Blutes(1928) and
Dans les rues. Aufruhr des Blutes, a pessimistic study of a small group of
people, fraught with sexual and class tension and culminating in violence,
reminds us in many ways of both Abram Room’s antecedent masterpiece
Bed and Sofa, and the later Menschen am Sonntag. Dans les rues
(1933 - with music by Hanns Eisler) is a film whose precise grasp of
social realities, put me in mind of the work of Jacques Becker. Both
Trivas films seemed to me more remarkable than his much better known
Niemansland, and extremely resonant in their construction of social reality
and incorporation of the populist materiel of mass culture.
Ozep’s well-known Der lebende Leichnam (1928) is always a wonderful
viewing experience, especially this time with the original score synchronised
by Martin Korber. Amok (1934) with its hot tropical erotic triangle,
the presence of Frehel and a musical score (should we say “jungle
music?») by Hanns Eisler, is one of the eccentricities which constitute the
specificity of this period of Mitteleuropean filmmaking. The program
note mentions that Amok was written by Boris Barnet. This brings to
mind a story I heard from Sergei Jutkevitsh. Barnet visited Paris and went
42 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

to a brothel. The girls were so attracted to this blonde athlete that they
wouldn’t let him out. He spent five weeks there. Which is more or less
the plot of Amok.
A not too dissimilar artificial paradise is presented in Granowsky’s Les
aventures du roi Pausole (1933), a strange but ultimately boring vision of
an imaginary kingdom - an island with populated with girls who seem to
have escaped from a Busby Berkeley film. This is a kingdom not on map,
“without history, without geography” - and it strikes us that this is yet
another projection of the psychic condition of the emigrant. In the other
Granowsky film screened, Das Lied von Leben (1931), chauvinist jokes,
nationalistic flag-waving and capitalism abound. In this ironic film, cold
bourgeois faces recall the parodic world of Georg Grosz, and the word
“Leben’’ is repeated ad absurdum, as a token of the obviously joylessness
of existence. While neither of these films comes near to Granowsky’s
unique achievement, Jewish Happiness (1925), they nevertheless extend
our sense of the brooding Weltanschaung of Mitteleurope in the interwar
period.
Another of the week’s surprises was, Überflüssige Menschen (Alexander
Rasumnyi,1926) which might be quite simply best Chechov adaptation
ever, fields a surprising cast of well-known German actors. It’s a film on
the same level as Rasumnyi’s Mother (shown at Pordenone in 1993).
Überflüssige Menschen depicts the now lost world of the Jewish country
theatre. The film is more impressionistic than structured, and seems
borne of the observation that life is a disconnected string of separate
milieus, professions, typicalities, personalities that are seldom in accord
even for a short, ostensibly unifying ceremony. It is a meditation on death
and Slavic desperation, full of fear and delirium, yet animated by fantastic
comic touches.
One of the challenges of an event like Bologna relates to film persnalities
with a well-known bodies of work. How should they be presented, and
what new light can be shed on their careers? A good case in point is a
Dieterle silent film which, as such, might be a minor program. But a
lesser Dieterle silent with Russian emigrants, in the connective context of
the other films from Mitteleurope becomes a much more interesting film.
And the Dieterle we think we know is shown to have a complex and
somewhat eccentric directorial character that has been obscured by his
‘idealized’ biography as a European who became a consumate studio
director in Hollywood. Dieterle’s Geschlecht in Fesseln (1928) is a prison
movie, although it doesn’t seem like a genre piece. The equation of
prison and society as a narrative metaphor was clearly a technical challenge
and a political provocation for the director, who employed radical
technical means (camera, composition, lightning) in a confined ambient
to tell a story about the relativity of justice, the failures of law and the
paradoxes of liberty.
One more typical Bologna touch was the program dedicated to the Dutch
avantgarde. Some of the images are still vivid in my mind nine months
later: the brilliant Europa Radio (1931) by Hans Richter (an early example
of sound montage, combining news, weather reports, music and sounds
43 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

drawn from ‘new’ and magical radio network from all over the world)
and the equally brilliant Tanz derFarben (1929) by Hans Fischinger,
brother of Oscar.
An important aspect of the Cinema Ritrovato experience is that the disappointments
are often as important as the successes, both historically,
and psychologically, for the viewer. If for no other reason, the disappointments
make us understand the full range and context of the cinema,and
provide a background against which good and great
achievements can be more accurately assessed. One disappointment this
year was the screening of a pathetic 16mm print of The Hunchback of
Notre Dame (1923) - and even in that case there was the wonderful original
music by Gabriel Thibaudeau and soprano by Marie-Josephe Lemay.
For me, Duvivier’s early film Haceldama (or Le prix du sang, 1919) was a
disappointment although clearly a “productive” one, handsomely experimental
with several magnificent cinematographic moments and sophisticated
concept of time that makes me think of Rashomon)
There is no festival in the world today which is better than Cinema
Ritrovatto at successfully dramatizing, without the slightest prejudice or
concern for hiererchy of genres, short, apparently forgotten, totally banal
or just “unpromising” material - like the tourist films like Rapallo 1910
and Napoli 1920. These films use the full range of cinema techniques
(split screen, tracking shots, dramatic tinting, toning and other effects).
It’s our failing - and an understandable one, perhaps - that we become
complacent, we think we know the films. We have to thank Bologna and
the other festivals for resurrecting the films and allowing us to see them
in a fresh light.
I can hardly wait for next year.
New Restoration Projects /
Nouveaux projets de restauration
Bois d’Arcy
Achives du Film du Centre National de la Cinématographie
Le Service des Archives du Film du CNC entreprend (en collaboration
avec la Cinémathèque Française) la reconstitution du premier catalogue
des films édités entre 1896 et 1897 par la société Léon Gaumont &
Compagnie (Paris). Ces films mesurent 58 mm de largeur, avec quatre
perforations rectangulaires de chaque côté de l’image. Leur longueur
varie entre 15 et 50 mètres. Ils ont été réalisés par différents opérateurs :
Georges Demenÿ, Anatole Thiberville, Deslandes et Pugenier, Jacques
Ducom, John Le Couteur, etc.
Les archives qui posséderaient des films issus de cette production sont
priées de se mettre en relation avec Madame Michelle Aubert, conserva-
44 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

teur du Service des Archives du Film du CNC, 7 bis rue Alexandre
Turpault, 78390 Bois d’Arcy.
Une liste de ces films a été établie par Laurent Mannoni, d’après les différents
catalogues français, anglais et allemand retrouvés récemment :
Abréviations :
CA = Catalogue allemand Lebende Projectionsbilder mit Hülfe des
Chronophotograph von G. Demény [sic], L. Gaumont et Cie, 57 rue Saint-
Roch, Paris, s.d. (fin 1896 - début 1897). 24 pages.
LAV = Catalogue anglais List of Animated Views generally in stock (Printed
on films of the Eastman Kodak Co), L. Gaumont et Cie, 57 rue Saint-Roch,
1897 (2 pages).
RT = “Liste des nouvelles vues animées généralement en magasin pour le
chronophotographe G. Demenÿ”, in Revue trimestrielle du Comptoir général
de photographie (Notice périodique sur les appareils, fournitures et nouveautés
photographiques), Paris, Comptoir général de photographie, mars
1897, p. 26.
3. Moulin Rouge : Quadrille. CA. Danse Moulin-Rouge, style : quadrille. LAV.
4. Moulin Rouge : Fantasie-Tanz in 4 Sujets. CA. Danse Moulin-Rouge style :
fancy dance with 4 subjects. LAV.
5. Moulin Rouge : Fantasie-Tanz in 2 Sujets. CA. Danse Moulin-Rouge style :
fancy dance with 2 subjects. LAV.
7. Avenue de l’Opéra. CA. Avenue de l’Opéra. (Walking backwards). LAV.
8. Hof des Bahnhofes Saint Lazare. CA. Cour of Saint-Lazare Station. LAV.
9. Abfahrt der automatischen Wagen bei Porte Maillot. CA. (Départ de la
voiture automatique près de la Porte-Maillot). Start of the motor carriages
at the Porte-Maillot. LAV.
11. Lebender Marmor : Der Apfel. CA. (Marbre vivant : la pomme).
Animated marble : The Apple. LAV.
12. Serpentine-Tanz “Loïe Fuller”. CA. Serpentine Danse : Loïe Fuller. LAV.
13. Carawane im Jardin d’Acclimatation. CA. Caravan at the Jardin
d’Acclimatation (Zoolog. Gardens). LAV.
14. Landungsplatz des Dampfbootes (N°1). CA. (Débarcadère du bateau à
vapeur). Landing-Place of steamboats at the Point-du-Jour (N°1). LAV.
15. Landungsplatz des Dampfbootes (N°2). CA. Landing-Place of steamboats
at the Point-du-Jour (N° 2). LAV.
16. Station du pont Marcadet, Chemin de fer du Nord. CA. Marcadet Bridge
Station, North Railway. LAV.
18. Volksfest, barrière du Trône. CA. (Fête populaire, barrière du Trône).
Popular Fair at the Barrier of the Trone. LAV.
19. Scene auf der Terrasse eines Cafés. CA. (Scène à la terrasse d’un café).
Scene at a coffee terrace. LAV.
20. Reitschule. CA. (Ecole d’équitation). Riding Lesson. LAV.
21. Fechtkunst : Einüben. CA. (Escrime : exercice). Before the assault : the
Wall. LAV.
22. Die beiden Fechter. CA. (Les deux escrimeurs). Assault of armes. LAV.
23. Rue de Rome und gare Saint-Lazare. CA. Rue de Rome and Saint-Lazare
Station. LAV.
45 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Call for co-operative research :
The Services des Archives du Film of the
CNC (together with the Cinémathèque
Française) has undertaken the reconstitution
of the first catalogue of films produced in
1896 and 1897 by the Léon Gaumont &
Cie, Paris. The object of this research
relates, in particular, to films shot by
Demenÿ, Thiberville, Deslandes and
Pugenier, Ducom, Le Couteur and others
(see list enclosed in the French text). Please
contact Michelle Aubert at Bois d’Arcy.
Llamado a colaboración :
Los Servicios de Archivos del Film del CNC
(conjuntamente con la Cinémathèque
Française) emprendió la reconstitucion del
primer catálogo de las películas producidas
en 1896 y 1897 por Léon Gaumont & Cie,
París. La investigación se refiere, en
particular, a películas rodadas por Demenÿ,
Thiberville, Deslandes y Pugenier, Ducom,
Le Couteur, etc... (consultar la lista del texto
francés). Sírvase contactar a Michelle
Aubert en Bois d’Arcy.

24. Damen-Duell. CA. (Duel de dames). Ladies duel. LAV.
26. St. Stephans-Platz in Wien. CA. Saint-Stephen’s Cathedral Square at
Vienna. LAV.
27. Frühstück im Kursaal in Wien. CA. (Petit-déjeuner au Kursaal à
Vienne). Birds breakfast at Vienna casino. LAV.
28. Platz der Rudolf-Caserne in Wien. CA. (Place de la caserne Rodolphe à
Vienne).
31. Rudolph barracks square, Vienna. LAV.
32. Opernplatz in Wien. CA. (Place de l’Opéra à Vienne). Opera Square,
Vienna. LAV.
33. Station de Ménilmontant, chemin de fer de Ceinture. CA. Ménilmontant
Station, Ceinture railway. LAV.
35. Ankunft des Präsidenten auf dem Rennplatz (Grand Prix de Paris 1896).
CA. Arrivée du président au champ de course). Arrival of the President of
the Republic at the Pesage, Paris, Grand Prix 1896. LAV.
37. Hecken-Sprung einer Escadron Dragroner. CA. (Escadron de dragons
sautant des haies). Leap of Hurdles by a squadron of Dragoons. LAV.
38. Dragoner. CA. Dragoons. LAV.
41. Ansturm der Dragroner. CA. (Dragons montant à l’assaut). Charge of
Dragoons. LAV.
42. Aufgesessen ! CA. (En selle !). To Horse ! LAV.
44. Transportwagen für grosse Bausteine. CA. (Voiture de transport pour
grandes pierres de construction). The lowry. LAV.
45. Serpentin-Tänzerin. CA. Serpent Charmer Girl. LAV.
46. St. Marien-Strasse in München (n° 1). CA. Saint-Mary’s street, Munich
(n° 1). LAV.
47. St. Marien-Strasse in München (n° 2). CA. Saint-Mary’s Street, Munich
(n° 2). LAV.
48. Hofbräuhaus in München. CA. (Brasserie à Munich). Royal Brewery,
Munich. LAV.
49. Die Artillerie am 14. Juli 1896. CA. (L’Artillerie au défilé du 14 juillet
1896). Filling off of Artillery : July 14th 1896. LAV.
50. Wehr bei München. CA. (Fortifications près de Munich). River draw,
Munich. LAV.
51. Abfahrt des Präsidenten nach der Truppenschau am 14. Juli 1896. CA.
(Départ du président après le défilé militaire du 14 juillet 1896).
Departure of the President after the Review on July 14th 1896. LAV.
52. Ankunft des chinesischen Gesandten bei Forges et Chantiers de la
Méditerranée in Havre. CA. (Arrivée de l’ambassadeur de Chine aux forges
et chantiers de la Méditerranée au Havre). Arrival of the Chinese ambassador
at the Forges and Chantiers de la Méditerranée at Havre (shooting-field).
LAV.
53. Kanonenschuss. CA. (Coup de canon). Firing of canons. LAV.
54. Abfahrt des Transatantischen Dampfers “la Normandie” in Le Havre. CA.
(Départ du bateau à vapeur transatlantique “La Normandie” au Havre.
The Transatlantic (Normandie) leaving Havre Harbour. LAV.
55. Der chinesische Gesandte verlässt Forges et Chantiers (Fortsetzung von n°
52). CA. (L’ambassadeur de Chine quitte les forges et chantiers - suite du
n° 52). The Chinese ambassador coming away from the Forges et Chantiers
46 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

(sequel to n° 52). LAV.
56. Die Sudanesen auf dem Champ-de-Mars. CA. (Les Soudanais au
Champ de Mars). The Soudanese at Champ de Mars. LAV.
57. Ausgang des Ateliers Panhard & Levassor. CA. (Sortie de l’atelier
Panhard et Levassor).The Exit from Panhard and Levassor’s Works. LAV.
58. Panorama von Paris. CA. Panorama of Paris. LAV.
59. Krahnen an der Seine. CA. (Grues au bord de la Seine). Crane on the
Seine. LAV.
61. Am Meeresufer, n° 1. CA. (Au bord de la mer). On the beach, n° 1. LAV.
62. Am Meeresufer, n° 2. CA. On the Beach, n° 2. LAV.
63. Am Strande, n° 1. CA. (Sur la plage). On the sands, n° 1. LAV.
64. Am Strande, n° 2. CA. On the sands, n° 2. LAV.
65. Der Landmann. CA. (Le fermier). The ploughman. LAV.
68. Die Wasserwerke in Versailles. CA. (Les grandes eaux à Versailles). The
Grandes Eaux at Versailles. LAV.
69. La Biche au bois.
70. Die Welle. CA. (La vague). The Wave. LAV.
71. Am Meeresufer. CA. (Au bord de la mer). Sea side. LAV.
72. Das Kartenspiel. CA. (La partie de cartes). Playing cards. LAV.
73. Fels im Meer. CA. (Rochers dans la mer). Rocks on sea side. LAV.
74. Schlechte Spieler. CA. (Mauvais joueurs). Bad at play. LAV.
75. Ballet in Japan, n° 1. CA. Japonese ballet n° 1. LAV.
76. Ballet in Japan, n° 2. CA. Japonese ballet n° 2. LAV.
77. L.L. M.M. le Czar et la Czarine à Paris. Alma. RT. Their Majesties the
Tsar and Tsarina in Paris (Alma). LAV.
78. L.L. M.M. le Czar et la Czarine à Paris. Etoile. RT. Der Czar und die
Czarin auf dem Wege nach Versailles (Aufnahme in den Champs Elysées). CA.
(Le tsar et la tsarine se rendant à Versailles - vue prise sur les Champs-
Elysées). Their Royal Highnesses the Tsar and Tsarina proceeding to
Versailles. (View taken in the Champs-Elysées). LAV.
79. L.L. M.M. le Czar et la Czarine à Paris. Saint-Cloud. RT. Der Czar und
die Czarin auf dem Wege nach Versailles (Aufnahme in St. Cloud). CA. Their
Royal Highnesses the Tsar and Tsarina proceeding to Versailles. (View taken at
Saint-Cloud). LAV.
80. Panorama du Havre (vue prise d’un bateau quittant le port). RT.
Panorama von Le Havre. CA. Panorama of Havre. LAV.
81. Port de Cherbourg (revue de l’escadre). RT. Hafen von Cherbourg,
Flottenschau. CA. Cherbourg Port. Review of the Squadron. LAV.
82. Cygnes et cigognes (vue prise au Jardin d’Acclimatation). RT. Schwäne
und Störche. CA. Swans and Storks. LAV.
83. A bord du paquebot de Douvres à Calais. RT. An Bord des Packet-
Dampfers Calais-Dover. CA. On board the Channel Steamer from Dover to
Calais. LAV.
84. Débarcadère d’un bateau-mouche à Toulon. RT. Landungsplatz des
Dampfbootes. CA. Landing-place of the fly-boat of the Seyne at Toulon. LAV.
85. Débardeurs (dans le port de Marseille). RT. Ausladen der Schiffe im
Hafen von Marseille. CA. Landing-place (Port of Marseille). LAV.
86. Le vieux port à Marseille. RT. Das alte Thor in Marseille. CA. Old port at
Marseilles. LAV.
47 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

87. Flux et reflux. RT. Ebbe und Fluth. CA. Ebb and flood. LAV.
88. Guerillas. RT. Guerillas (Spanien). CA. Guerillas (Spain). LAV.
89. Dispute espagnole. RT. Scene aus dem spanischen Leben. CA. Spanish
Custom. LAV.
90. Place de Barcelone (la Rambla). RT. Barcelona (Fuhrleute). CA.
Barcelona (carrier). LAV.
92. Brûleur d’herbe (au bord de la mer). RT. Verbrennen von Gras am
Meeresufer. CA. Herb-burners by the sea side. LAV.
93. Défilé de cavalerie espagnole. RT. Spanische Cavallerie im Manöver. CA.
Spanish cavalry, working dress. LAV.
96. Leçon de bicyclette. RT. Radfahrer-Unterricht. CA. Bicycle lesson. LAV.
97. Zouaves. Exercices d’assouplissement. RT. Zouaven. Turnübungen. CA.
Zouaves. Exercices without apparatus. LAV.
98. Zouaves. Battage des couvertures. RT. Zouaven. Ausklopfen der Decken.
CA. Zouaves. Beating of coverings. LAV.
99. Zouaves. A l’exercice. RT. Zouaven. Im Dienst. CA. Zouaves. Drilling.
LAV.
100. Zouaves. Aux pommes de terre. RT. Zouaven. Bei den Kartoffeln. CA.
Zouaves. Preparing potatoes. LAV.
101. Zouaves. Escrime à la baïonnette. RT. Zouaven. Bajonett-Fechten. CA.
Zouaves. Bayonet-fencing. LAV.
102. Surprise désagréable. RT. Unangenehme Ueberraschung. CA.
Disagreable surprise. LAV.
103. La servante maladroite. RT. Das ungeschickte Dienstmädchen. CA. The
Awkward Servant. LAV.
104. Tramway à Alger. RT. Tramway in Algier. CA.
105. La montée du quai à Alger. RT. Am Quai in Algier. CA. Ascent of the
quays at Algiers. LAV.
106. Place du Gouvernement à Alger. RT. Place du Gouvernement, Algier.
CA. Place du gouvernement at Algiers. LAV.
107. Place du Théâtre à Alger. RT. Place du Théâtre, Algier. CA. Place du
Théâtre at Algiers. LAV.
110. Boeuf gras 1897, “char de la charcuterie”. RT. Fat Ox 1897. Car of the
Pork-butchers. LAV.
111. Boeuf gras 1897, “chars de l’alimentation”. RT. Fat Ox 1897. Car of the
alimentation. LAV.
112. Fat Ox 1897. Car of the she-cats. The Hats. LAV.
NOVEMBRE 1897 : NOUVELLE NUMEROTATION
La Mise au point, Revue photographique trimestrielle, n° 1, novembre 1897 :
“Liste des nouvelles vues animées généralement en magasin pour le chronophotographe
G. Demenÿ. Tirées sur bandes de 60 mm de largeur”.
42. Une nuit agitée.
143. Transformation d’un chapeau.
144. France et Russie.
145. Chez le barbier.
48 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

Série L.
1. Equipages.
2. Défilé de troupes anglaises n° 1.
3. Défilé de troupes anglaises n° 2.
4. Défilé de troupes anglaises n° 3.
5. Défilé de troupes anglaises n° 4.
6. Défilé de troupes anglaises n° 5.
7. Jubilé. Cortège passant à Apsley-House.
11. Jubilé. Cortège passant à Apsley-House. Les lanciers.
12. Jubilé. Cortège passant à Apsley-House. La cérémonie à Saint-Paul.
14. Jubilé. Cortège passant à Apsley-House. Le cortège de Saint-Paul.
15. Troupes coloniales à Hyde-Park.
16. Troupes coloniales à Hyde-Park.
17. Troupes coloniales à Hyde-Park.
19. Troupes coloniales à Hyde-Park.
20. Troupes coloniales à Hyde-Park.
21. Troupes coloniales à Hyde-Park.
23. Le Carrosse royal.
26. Revue navale à Spithead.
28. Revue navale.
31. Le Réveil des jeunes filles.
33. Revue navale.
34. Scène d’enfants à leur réveil.
37. Revue navale. Le Saint-Vincent.
38. Revue navale. Le Saint-Vincent.
41. Revue navale. Le Saint-Vincent.
42. Le duc de Cambridge et sa suite.
43. Troupes coloniales à Hyde-Park.
44. Partie de mail-coach.
47. Le prince de Galles présentant les médailles.
48. Le prince de Galles et sa suite.
49. Troupes coloniales.
50. Le prince et sa suite royale.
51. La princesse et sa suite royale.
55. Train à corridor (50 m. ou 23 m.).
59. Exposition de chevaux à Welbeck (50 m. ou 23 m.).
62. Duc et duchesse d’York en Irlande.
63. Duc et duchesse d’York en Irlande quittant Dublin.
64. Passage de l’écluse (50 m. ou 23 m.).
49 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

Out of the Attic: Archiving Amateur Film
Open Forum
FIAF Symposium, 21-23 April 1997
Jan-Christopher Horak
Although amateur film has in some circles been long accepted as an integral
part of our motion picture heritage, it was an almost revolutionary
act for FIAF to dedicate a symposium to this film form. After all, FIAF
was founded as an organisation to defend film «art» against the barbarous
hordes of cinema commercialism, and home movies, according to
the conventional wisdom of the archives, were neither art, nor culturally
respectable. Indeed, it has only been as recent as Mo i Rana (1993) that
FIAF accepted the notion that newsreels were worthy of preservation and
study and not just fiction features by cinema auteurs.
Even if one wanted to take amateur cinema seriously, there are seemingly
insurmountable problems. First, there seems to be so much of it. How is
an archivist to make a selection, when virtually everyone’s father, uncle or
grand-mother shoots films of the kids? Hardly a day goes by, without
someone calling the archive to offer their home movies, producing little
more than a tired, invisible frown into the telephone. Secondly, even if
one chooses to accept a collection, there seems to be no way of cataloguing
these often titleless, creditless, unidentified pieces of celluloid, and
therefore no means of integrating them into the archive. Thirdly, there are
all those nasty little, obsolete gauges - 8mm, S-8, 9.5mm, 16mm,
17.5mm, 22mm, 28mm - requiring long lost projection equipment,
newly engineered gates for duplicating machines, and lots of funding.
Finally, there is the belief that neither audiences for amateur films exist,
nor are there methodologies to organize programming of such films.
Given these problems, it was just convenient to forget about them and
hope they went away.
Fortunately, some film scholars and regional film archivists, have recognized
that amateur film could be of more than passing interest. In particular
we must credit our Latin American colleagues for sensitizing the
major national film archives to this issue. It was at FIAF Havana (1990)
that the thesis was first advanced within the organisation that, in the
absence of an indigenous commercial film industry, amateur film could
constitute a national cinema. And now in Cartagena, we must thank our
Columbian friends, especially Jorge Nieto, for organizing a truly watershed
symposium. That the question of amateur film history merits much
discussion was demonstrated by the first panel of the symposium, where
the perplexed looks of film archivists from the major FIAF institutions
facing amateur film - why was no representative from a regional or Latino
archive on the panel? - resembled the virgin discovering her baby.
The symposium’s most important revelation was that amateur films, far
from being just home movies, define a cinema almost as rich in form as
professional cinema, and certainly potentially as sophisticated, even if the
50 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

gauges in question are sub-standard. At least four general directions in
amateurism were visible in Cartagena: ethnographic/travel films, documentary,
familial « home movies », and avant-garde films. After a few
days’ proceedings, it also became clear that these genres are not mutually
exclusive, but rather intertwined: familial narratives become documents
of history, documentary images are fictionalized, all of them inscribed by
the subjectivity of their makers, by the desire of the audience.
Just how complex these varying layers of reality, fiction, and history
could be was demonstrated by the first featured speaker, Jake Homiak,
from the Human Studies Film Archives at the Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C. Homiak showed three different examples of «anthropological
» footage, produced by European amateurs, looking at native,
non-white cultures and peoples. Such films, while marked by the racial
and cultural prejudices inherent in a First World view of the Third
World, often constitute the only visual record of now «lost» cultures, traditions,
and environments. As a result, as Homiak notes, these films have
become contested sites for indigenous peoples, attempting to reclaim
their history and mythology. Thus, footage filmed by a Catholic priest in
the 1930s of Native Americans on King Island in Alaska has been annotated
by native survivors, utilizing these films as a catalyst for the tribe’s
collective memory (the U.S. Government eventually forced them to relocate).
That such films indeed articulate an alternative history - in contrast
to the official government histories of the newsreels - focusing on marginalized
societies, persons, and events, was reinforced by numerous
speakers, including Roger Smither (W.W.II footage of evacuated children),
Wolfgang Klaue (Wehrmacht soldiers filming Jewish ghettos), Nico
de Klerk (amateurs in Dutch Indonesia), and others.
But these amateur documentaries offer more than « history from the bottom
». They are also articulations of a culture’s mythology and its desire,
especially when manipulated ex post facto. This was demonstrated by
Homiak when he showed a film by a Filipino-American filmmaker, who
utilizes extremely heterogeneous anthropological footage from the
Philippines to construct a completely fictional narrative of his grandfather,
who was supposedly abducted to the United States. This writer ventures
to guess that 95% of the audience of sophisticated archivists was
completely duped into believing that his narrative was « truthful », that
these amateur images and sound-track presented an empirical reality.
This question came up the next morning, when a panel from the
Japanese-American Museum in Los Angeles and UCLA screened
Something Strong Within (1995, Bob Nakamura) and introduced a CD-
Rom, both of which make use of amateur films, shot by Japanese-
Americans interned in concentration camps by the American government
during World War II. While the panellists argued that these films visualized
a « lost », unofficial history that was more truthful than the Hearst
newsreel of the same event, because they refrained from manipulating
history and film, « allowing the people to speak for themselves », this
reviewer noted that their reworking of images with music aestheticized
history, turning these historical home movies into an aesthetic object.
51 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Du grenier: archivage du film amateur.
Même si on veut prendre le cinéma amateur
au sérieux - écrit l’auteur - on se heurte à
des problèmes insurmontables: 1) il semble y
avoir tellement de ces films, 2) même si on
accepte de constituer une collection, il ne
semble pas y avoir de bons moyens de
cataloguer ces pièces de celluloïd souvent
sans titres, sans génériques, non identifiées,
et par conséquent sans possibilité d’être
intégrées dans l’archive, 3) il y a tous ces
petits méchants formats - 8mm, S-8,
9.5mm, 16mm, 17.5mm, 22mm, 28mm -
qui requièrent des appareils de lecture
reconstitués. Finalement il subsiste aussi la
crainte qu’il n’y ait pas de spectateurs pour
ces films, pas plus qu’il n’y aurait de
méthodologie adéquate pour les
programmer.
Ces problèmes étant mentionnés, il était
possible de les oublier et d’espérer qu’ils
n’existent plus. C’est le défi que la FPFC et
la FIAF ont décidé de relever en organisant
le Symposium de Cartagena de Indias. Dans
son article, Chris Horak nous invite à
revivre les meilleurs moments du symposium
ainsi que les principaux sujets présentés par
les orateurs.
Fuera del desván: archivar el cine
amateur
Aunque se quisiera tomar el ciné amateur
en serio - escribe el autor - se enfrenta uno
con grandes obstáculos : 1) hay gran
cantidad de este tipo de películas, 2) aunque
se acepten colecciones, parecería no haber
medios adequados para catalogar tantos
fragmentos de celluloïde, a menudo sin
títulos, sin identificación y, por consiguiente,
sin posiblidades de ser integrados en el
archivo, 3) ... además están todos esos
malditos formatos - 8mm, S-8, 9.5mm,
16mm, 17.5mm, 22mm, 28mm - que
requieren aparatos de lectura reconstituidos.
Finalamente, subsiste también la sospecha
de que no hay público para esos filmes,
como tampoco hay una metodología para
programarlos. Felizmente, una vez
mencionados, estos problemas se pierden en
la esperanza de que ya no existen... Es, al
menos, el desafio que decidió aceptar la
FPFC y la FIAF al organizar el Symposium
de Cartagena de Indias. En su artículo,
Chris Horak nos invita a revivir los mejores
momentos y los principales enfoques
abordados por los oradores del simposio.

Such an aesthetisization is certainly legitimate as a project of memory
and mourning (Nakamura is himself a survivor), but one should be cognizant
of the fact that it is also a depoliticization, making the event both
safe and consumable to a larger public. In this sense, the Hearst footage,
in which the ideological contradictions between image and text are more
than obvious to contemporary audiences, may actually offer more food
for thought about America’s racist past, than the home movies.
A completely different perspective on amateur films was presented by
Prof. Roger Odin from the University of Paris, who discussed home
movies as narratives of familial desire. Odin began by noting that amateur
filmmakers love the technology of cinema, i.e. film cameras are in
fact toys for the family to play with, toys which further family togetherness,
harmony, and pleasure. Everyone gets involved, either in front of
the camera or behind it. If home movies are badly done, i.e. technically
inept, this too is an aesthetic strategy, because it is the act of production
and reception which are important, not the product itself. Indeed, the
home movie’s very imperfection allows family members to « narrativize »
the film while it is being projected, making it a « family text » by relating
their individual perspectives. The ideological role of home movies, then,
is to create harmony in the family. Where Odin lost a part of his own
audience was when he insisted on a Freudian interpretation which
posited a father behind the camera, controlling the image, while the look
into the camera (against the conventions of classical Hollywood narrative)
becomes a signification of oedipal relationships between the filmmaker
and his subjects, filled with sadism and seduction. Still, Odin’s
point is well-taken that home movies are basically auteurless, that they
eschew a personal narrative, in order to allow family members to create
narrative.
One of the most interesting revelations about amateur films was that
such films could also be « art ». Some amateurs have always had artistic
ambitions, as evidenced by a host of presentations: Janet McBain
screened an extract from a charming little film, All on a Summer’s Day
(1933) which was won a prize at one of the oldest Scottish amateur film
festivals. Hisashi Okajima showed a series of astonishing, animated shorts
by Japanese amateur Shigeji Ogino, which recalled Oskar Fischinger,
German Expressionist cinema, Lotte Reiniger classical Japanese painting,
and presaged Jordon Belson and Peter Kubelka’s 1960s flicker films.
From Spain came El hombre importante (1935) by Domènec Giménez i
Botey, a highly allegorical live action film that referred to both Buñuel
and surrealism. Sara Harb from the Fundación Cinemateca del Caribe
(Columbia) screened Faustino (1950s) by Gaston Lemaitre and Luis
Mogollón, which could have been a remake of Hans Richter’s Ghosts
Before Breakfast (1928), and another outrageously self-conscious « art »
film, La Langosta Azul (1950s), directed by Alvaro Cepeda Samudio with
the participation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Finally, one of the most startling
avant-garde discoveries came from Milano, Le Cas de Monsieur
Valdemar (1934), based on a E.A. Poe short story and directed by Ubaldo
Magnaghi and Gianni Hoepli. This surrealistic film clearly belongs in the
52 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

tradition of Blood of a Poet and Fall of the House of Usher. In toto, these
amateur films could be programmed as part of an alternative avant-garde
film history, which would include all those films not canonized by the
official film histories. That an avant-garde film history is still very much a
matter of huge gaps and fissures in our knowledge is demonstrated by
the fact that nearly fifty filmmakers made such films in the United States
before Maya Deren, yet all of them have heretofore been excluded from
the canon. On the other hand, we need to realize that most “classical”
avant-garde films from Man Ray to Maya Deren were in fact amateur
films, made by artists who were not full-time
filmmakers. Not until after World War II were
avant-garde filmmakers professionalized, thanks
to museums, universities, and government and
foundation grants.
As a number of speakers noted, archivists must
also realize that amateur cinema documents a
social phenomena of immense, international proportions,
and therefore represents a history of the
medium itself. Amateur film clubs existed world
wide and developed global systems of distribution
and exhibition. Thus, since the 1920s literally
hundreds of thousands of amateurs have
taken the means of production of mass communication into their own
hands, in order to produce something akin to a democratic art form. This
point was made most directly by Prof. Patricia Zimmermann from Ithaca
College. Her very dense lecture summed up many important issues,
including: 1) Transnational, multimedia corporations now control the
production and distribution of images world-wide, delimiting the expression
of public and local cultural formations, in the interest of creating
passive consumers. 2) The study of amateur film and amateur film cultures
allows for the construction of a more diversified, even conflictladen
view of history which refuses to harmonize ideological
contradictions. 3) Amateur films document the history of marginalized
peoples and cultures, but maybe more importantly, their fantasy lives, i.e.
they are documents of social relations at the fringes. 4) As a result of its
very independence from both the technology and economy of mass
media, amateur film still allows for a freedom of expression that can open
-up suppressed and politically undesirable discourses, or as Zimmermann
put it, « create an imaginary geography beyond the global flows of
transnationalism.» Therein lies the promise and pleasure of amateur film
Clearly, much work needs to be done. Amateur film now encompasses
amateur video, an area the major archives have not even dared to touch,
given video’s preservation problems. Secondly, criteria for collecting and
evaluating amateur film need to be formulated, if the archives are to
begin systematic preservation. Finally, as this conference proves yet again,
film archivists need to communicate more with film historians, not only
(grudgingly) providing services (as in the past), but entering into a true
dialogue.
53 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Peter Kubelka during his
presentation in Cartagena

There was this film about...
The Case for the Shotlist
Olwen Terris
Film and television archives are not only collections of complete and
incomplete works, they are also rich repositories of individual images.
The National Film and Television Archive (NFTVA) in London has preserved
millions of feet of film for the nation, and an incalculable number
of unique images. Shotlisting is all about opening to view and making an
archive’s riches accessible. It is a truism that archives and their governing
bodies cannot give access to images that they do not know they have.
Shotlisting is the only sure means of highlighting what is in store.
This fact was recognised at the outset of the NFTVA. From its foundation
in 1935 and for the first years of its existence, the aim of the Cataloguing
Department was to view and shotlist every film acquired. When the
number of acquisitions was relatively small, 100 titles a year or less, this
was feasible and the aspiration was generally met. Shotlisting was
regarded by some as a pleasant luxury, few cataloguers asked why they
were going to such lengths to document the collection.
As acquisitions grew at a rate which far outstripped the number of cataloguers
available to shotlist them, the lack of time caused the value of the
shotlist to be reviewed and priorities were set. What are the advantages
of describing the film shot by shot? Does it benefit the users of the collection
and at what cost? One of the obvious advantages of shotlisting a
film is that potential viewers may not need to see the film if it is clear
from a written description that it does not contain the sequence of
images they need. The film is spared the physical wear and tear of
another screening, a speculative viewing is avoided, transport costs are
kept down, time is saved. For example if the shotlist describes very
young girls playing in a school playground when the user wants older
boys and girls playing together in a classroom then the film is clearly not
suitable for their purposes.
Another advantage of the shotlist is that researchers may be more interested
in what they hear than what they see and if a transcript is not available
(and in many cases it isn’t) then an account or full summary of what
is being said is very useful. For example a British television documentary
produced in the early 1960s reported on the attitudes of British housewives
in a northern town to their new West Indian neighbours. The
images are not particularly striking (the women sitting in their homes
talking to the interviewer) but their comments illustrating their fears and
acknowledged prejudices make a fine historical and social record. If the
cataloguer had not described that dialogue, and had just written a brief
synopsis along the lines of `Women in a northern town talk about racial
prejudice’ the catalogue record would be accurate as far as it went but
would have far less value as an accurate account of content.
54 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

Shotlisting can often add valuable information to a film’s production history.
This is particularly true when cataloguing silent film where documentation
is often sparse or non-existent. Information taken direct from
the screen, as opposed to secondary sources, is extremely important.
Here the cataloguer is describing the print the Archive holds - not the
nebulous `ideal’ of an definitive and unchanging final version. For example,
the cataloguer may be viewing an unidentified German film, with
French intertitles, with scenes missing or in the wrong order - this happens
more frequently than one might imagine. If the cataloguer is to
spend a great deal of time identifying the title of the film, the actors who
appear in it, analysing the narrative and supplying information on missing
scenes, then, one could argue, you might as well go to the small extra
trouble of describing in words what you see and compile the shotlist.
If the cataloguer views a film then it is possible to increase the number of
number of access points when assigning subject indexing terms or keywords
or employing free text searching. If the description of a film is
only taken from secondary sources then a shorter written description will
tend to be generalised. A simple example might be a film about the
decline of the British coal mining industry in the 1980s. The cataloguer,
lacking any specific information on content, might index the film under
`coal mining’. Having also then viewed the film then he or she might be
prompted to index the mechanical apparatus and processes used, the collieries
shown, industrial disputes, the names of miners and officials interviewed
and the more abstract terms such as `working conditions’,
`industrial landscapes’ or `economic decline’. Indexing under these subjects
will obviously increase the likelihood of a wider range of researchers
finding that film and reusing the footage. Having accepted that there are
strong advantages in shotlisting films, while acknowledging that for many
archives the shotlisting of every film is a practical impossibility, then how
does the cataloguer decide which films or television programmes to
shotlist? This difficult decision should be guided by the nature of the collection
and the use (both actual and potential) made of it it by the
researchers. Which areas of a collection could benefit from more scholarly
research? Are there small unique collections within an archive which,
in the interests of information provision, should be made more widely
available to other archives at home and abroad? Are there films for which
the Archive holds the rights that might be exploited more efficiently
through very detailed cataloguing? The NFTVA has chosen to concentrate
on pre-1920 cinema and is now moving on to include documentaries up
to the 1940s. Shotlisting early cinema has proved invaluable in providing
a scholarly account of what we hold. Films from this period are less well
documented in filmographies and their production and distribution history
are significantly more complicated. Such films are frequently
acquired without titles, with scenes in the wrong order and incomplete.
A detailed shot-by-shot description of the images seen in the Archive’s
print, supplemented by research on the film’s history, can give film historians
valuable information. The description of the shots themselves can
throw light on cinematographic technique - the use of close-up, crosscutting,
lighting of interior scenes, continuation of narrative and so on.
55 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Il y avait ce film sur... le cas des la
liste de prises de vue.
Dresser la liste des prises de vue est essentiel
lorsqu’il s’agit de visionner et de rendre les
richesses d’une archive accessibles. Le
répertoriage est le seul moyen de savoir ce
qu’il y a dans les collections. Depuis sa
fondation en 1935, et pour les premières
années de son existence, le but du
département de catalogage de ce qui est
devenu le NFTVA était de visionner et de
répertorier chaque film acquis. Quels sont
les avantages de décrire un film plan par
plan ? Le premier avantage évident est que
le chercheur potentiel ne doit pas
nécessairement visionner le film à condition
que la description écrite contienne toute
l’information nécessaire. Autre avantage de
cette liste c’est que le chercheur pourrait être
plus intéressé par ce qu’il entend que par ce
qu’il voit, et qu’un descriptif complet de ce
qui est dit est très utile. De plus, une telle
liste peut souvent ajouter de l’information de
valeur à l’histoire de la production du film.
Finalement, si le catalogueur visionne un
film il est possible d’augmenter le nombre de
critères de recherche, lors de l’adoption
d’index par sujets, par mots-clés ou par
texte libre.
Des études et des statistiques montrent que
la majorité des chercheurs n’arrivent pas au
NFTVA munis de la liste des titres qu’ils
recherchent. En effet, quelque 60% des
chercheurs formulent leur demande en
fonction d’un sujet précis. Si chaque
chercheur arrivait à l’archive avec une liste
précise de titres ou de réalisateurs, il n’y
aurait qu’un besoin très limité d’une table de
matière détaillée. La liste des plans est un
service fourni par les catalogueurs aux
utilisateurs qui ne savent pas exactement ce
qu’ils cherchent.

Wood sculpture of Brienz, France 1910
Subjective notes from the cataloguer, properly acknowledged as such in a
note, on peculiarities of performing style may also be of interest to others
and might be noted. This information is particularly useful for film historians
working abroad who may not be able to travel to undertake viewings;
in many cases a full and accurate shotlist can answer many
questions. As the century concludes programme makers are becoming
increasingly interested in the social and political history of Britain in the
1950s and 1960s. In response to this demand the NFTVA has identified
key television documentaries of the time covering such aspects as abortion,
homosexuality, race relations or Northern Ireland. Giving a fuller
account of the attitudes expressed in these programmes is proving to be
very valuable to film researchers and without doubt more of this footage
is being retrieved and re-used in documentary programme making.
In the days before video recorders and cameras
were widely available and relatively cheap, the public
had no means of capturing images of personal
interest to them. For example a talent show series
transmitted in the 1960s, OPPORTUNITY
KNOCKS, featured several acts each week: viewers
were invited to vote for the best act. Years later the
relatives of the people who first appeared in these
episodes are often anxious to see their fathers or
sisters perform their acts. It is sensible, and a helpful
public service, for the cataloguers to look at the
few surviving programmes and to list all the artists
and describe the performances. This account
enables us to respond quickly and efficiently to
requests of this kind and record a small piece of
entertainment history. It is sometimes argued that an archive needn’t
bother cataloguing television programmes in detail as the television companies
themselves should keep good records. In Great Britain some companies
do; the majority does not. And for those companies who do keep
good catalogue records it should not be assumed that a cataloguing section’s
access to them would be quick or cheap - they, like the archives,
are being urged to make money from information and may not be willing
to disseminate shotlist information free of charge. Specialist film libraries
(for example newsfilm libraries) have been generally quicker than film
archives to recognise the commercial value of the images they held. If the
cataloguers they employ use their specialist knowledge to identify people,
places, objects, events and describe and index these in great detail these
images can be quickly retrieved and re-used by film researchers. If they
hold the rights in those images so much the better. Cataloguers working
in stockshot libraries may, for example, in one shot describe each building,
the cars in the street, the weather, the clothes a person is wearing,
the facial expression they show, and the gestures they make. This is
descriptive cataloguing at its height. How much detail should a cataloguer
working in a general archive put into a shotlist? The answer is to
keep a sense of proportion and try to equate the amount of work
involved with the needs of the users and what the cataloguer wants to
56 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

achieve. For example if the cataloguer is shotlisting a television documentary
which begins with a series of establishing shots of Paris, and the
cataloguer knows that the collection contains many such shots, then they
will probably simply write `establishing shots of Paris’. If the Archive
does not hold many films with shots of Paris then they may wish to highlight
the scenes by describing them in more detail identifying the specific
buildings in shot and describing the angle from which they were taken.
The cataloguer might know from experience that film of women working
in factories in the first half of the century is frequently requested; if this
is the case then they will be careful to describe and index the shot whenever
they come upon such footage. If they are dealing with a subject of
which they have little specialist knowledge then a careful description
may still aid the expert in identification - an account of the machines
used in an obsolete manufacturing process, for example. It is important
that cataloguers are aware of the enquiries put to the archive and understand
and recognise the vocabulary which researchers use when putting
their requests. If the cataloguing team is divorced from the people who
use its records then it is less likely to be aware of the areas of the collection
which may require fuller cataloguing. Equally as important, they are
less likely to know when they are getting it right. Cataloguers may also
wish to help in the exploitation of those films for which an archive holds
the rights. Giving a fuller description of content and providing in-depth
indexing will `sell’ the film to a wider audience. There is now use of the
term `commercial cataloguing’ - that is paying particular attention to
those films in the collection which have (or are perceived to have) an
immediate commercial value. The underlying risk is that cataloguers will
concentrate scarce resources on such films at the expense of spending
time examining and cataloguing other films which, in the future, may
have a greater cultural (and possibly commercially) value. An event
which seems run of the mill at the time and scarcely worth mentioning
may suddenly become national news - such requests are unpredictable
and it is often down to chance whether the cataloguer has described the
event or personality or not.
Surveys and statistics show time and time again that the majority of
researchers do not come to the NFTVA equipped with specific titles. The
majority, some 60%, phrase their request in the form of a subject: do you
have footage of people sitting as a family watching television; do you
have any films about ocean liners; there was the television programme
about five years ago - I can’t remember what they called it but there was
this... If every researcher came to the Archive with a list of specific titles,
or directors, then there would be very little need for a detailed summary
of content. Shotlisting is largely a service provided by cataloguers for
users who don’t know exactly what they want. They require guidance
and encouragement from the staff whose professional skills enable them
to interpret their records, make suggestions and provide information
quickly. If an archive fails to respond to the complex needs of its clients,
and that failure has been caused in part by inadequate descriptive cataloguing
and indexing, then the case for the shotlist has been made.
57 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Había un film sobre... el asunto del
listado de planos
Establecer la lista de planos o tomas es
escencial para permitir el acceso a las
colecciones. Un repertorio detallado de
tomas es el único medio de saber qué
contienen las colecciones. Desde su creación
en 1935, el objetivo principak de lo que
luego fuera el NFTVA, era de visualizar y
repertoriar cada film adquirido. Qué
ventajas ofrece le descripción de una
película, plano por plano ? La primera es
que el investigador no deberá
necesariamente visualizar toda la película, a
condición que la descripción escrita contenga
las informaciones necesarias. Otras ventajas
de este tipo de lista, es que también ofrece la
posibilidad de buscar detalles de la pista
sonora, o sobre la producción , y que
permite la adopción de un mayor número de
criterios de interrogación, de índices por
tema, por palabras clave o por texto libre.
Varios estudios y estadísticas muestran que
los investigadores llegan al NFTVA sin la
lista de títulos que desean consultar.
Aproximadamente un 60% formulan su
pedido en función de un tema preciso. Si
cada investigador llegara con una lista
precisa de títulos o de directores, no habría
mayor necesidad de una descripción
detallada de los filmes. La lista detallada de
planos o tomas es por ende un servicio
ofrecido a los utilizadores que no saben con
exactitud lo que buscan.

Ricardo Muñoz Suay (1917-1997)
In Memoriam
Nieves López-Menchero
El que fue creador y director de la Filmoteca de la Generalitat Valenciana
(Valencia, España) había nacido en Valencia en 1917, el año de la
Revolución Rusa, como le gustaba señalar.
Hijo de una importante familia valenciana, de corte liberal, burguesa y
culta, creció en un ambiente en el que política y libros se repartían por
igual el interés familiar. El padre, un importante médico amigo de otros
muy ilustres doctores y profesores como el Dr. Peset Alexandre, el Dr.
Moliner, o del importante político y periodista Azzati, del escritor Blasco
Ibáñez, fue Concejal de sanidad del Ayuntamiento de Valencia desde
mediados de los años veinte, durante sus mandatos dieron comienzo las
vacunaciones masivas en la ciudad, invitó a Mme. Curie y abrió
numerosos asilos para ancianos y enfermos y, durante la guerra civil, fue
delegado de la Cruz Roja en la Zona de Levante; republicano de izquierdas,
masón durmiente, anticlerical y bibliófilo alertó a su hijo Ricardo
cuando éste se afilió, en 1932, al partido comunista español “has caído
en una iglesia” le dijo... y Ricardo cuando contaba esto siempre añadía “y
tenía razón”. Su madre fue una inteligente y culta mujer de la burguesía
valenciana, de tradición conservadora hasta que la postguerra, las represiones
y, especialmente, la protección que tuvo que dar a su hijo Ricardo,
durante los seis años de escondite que tuvo que sufrir, la hicieron cambiar
de costumbres y también muchas de sus ideas.
En 1932 Ricardo conoció a Juan Piqueras, el primer crítico de cine
español, que le transmitió su pasión por el cine. Años más tarde, cuando
funda la Filmoteca homenajea a este gran crítico poniendo su nombre a
la sala de proyecciones.
Dedicado plenamente a la política y a la guerra civil tiene que sufrir
escondite durante seis años y cárcel durante tres años más. Por fin en
1949 puede salir a la calle. Mientras estuvo encarcelado, en Alcalá de
Henares y en Ocaña, conoció a Pablo G. del Amo -después un gran
montador de cine- y a Ramón Piñeiro, Luis Michelena y José Bergamín
importantes intelectuales, y a otros muchos que fueron sus amigos para
siempre y de los que se sintió orgulloso por su amistad, empezada en tan
malos momentos, es entonces cuando escribe su primera obra dedicada
al cine “Canto al Cinema” poema en prosa en el que vuelca su pasión
cinematográfica.
En 1951 el director Antonio del Amo le da una oportunidad en la
película “Día tras día” y ahí dice Ricardo “empezó mi otra vida”. Después
vinieron “Esa pareja feliz”, “Bienvenido Mr. Marshall”, “Sangre y luces”,
“La pícara molinera”, “Susana y yo”, “Los amantes del desierto”, “Una
aventura de Gil Blas”, “Tal vez mañana”, “Sonatas”, “Viridiana”, “La
becerrada”, “Una jaula no tiene secretos”, “Millonario por un día”, “El
verdugo”, “La mano en la trampa” “L’ombrellone”, “El momento de la
58 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

verdad”, “Nueve cartas a Berta”, “El último sábado”, “C’era una volta”,
“Después del diluvio”, “Cabezas cortadas”, “Tirarse al monte”, “El
reportero”, “La saga de los dráculas”, “La nova cançó”, “Perros callejeros”,
“Sonámbulos”, “La vieja memoria”, “Las rutas del sur”, “Mater amatisima”
y “Carmen”.
Esta es su filmografía más sobresaliente. Trabajó con Del Amo, Bardem,
Berlanga, Martín Patino, Picazo, Regueiro, Forqué, Klimosvsky, Buñuel,
Rosi, Antonioni, Losey, Berry, Camino, Gutiérrez Aragón, Ungría, Torre
NIlson, Risi, Bellmunt, Rocha, Esteva, Zavattini, Azcona, Rouquier, y un
largo etc.
Fundamentalmente trabajó como ayudante de dirección, pero también
fue productor y productor ejecutivo, guionista, director adjunto, crítico,
miembro de jurados de festivales (Venecia, San Sebastián, Valencia, etc.)
No hay asunto en el cine que le fuera ajena, crea productoras, revistas,
colecciones de libros..., aunque él decía que en el cine era “ayudante de
dirección, algo casi tan importante como el director...”
A partir de 1953 vuelve a trabajar para el partido comunista, y con Jorge
Semprún se encarga de organizar la resistencia antifranquista entre los
intelectuales y los trabajadores del cine.
En los años setenta compagina su trabajo cinematográfico con el editorial
adquiriendo esta nueva dedicación cada vez mayor importancia:
Muchnick, Tusquets, Bruguera y Seix y Barral son las editoriales para las
que trabajará creando colecciones, siendo relaciones públicas y, sobre
todo, haciendo dos de sus “otras pasiones” : libros y amigos. Conocerá
en estos años a Juan Marsé, los hermanos Goytisolo, Octavio Paz, Vargas
Llosa, José Donoso, Ángel González, Jorge Edwards, García Márquez,
Borges, Barral, Vázquez Montalbán y otra vez una lista de amigos.
Ricardo dijo que nombres claves en su vida eran tantos como facetas
tenía su personalidad: política, literatura, cine, vivir... Buñuel, Zavattini,
Antonioni, Rosi, Sciascia, Semprún, Hemingway...
Después de vivir en Madrid y Barcelona vuelve a Valencia, a partir de
1980 poco a poco, con la oportunidad que le da el Ayuntamiento al
crearse el festival de cine “Mostra de Valencia”, se crea después la
Fundación Municipal de Cine y participa en ella como subdirector hasta
1987. En 1985 el gobierno autónomo le llama como asesor cultural del
consejero (ministro) de cultura y Ricardo se afinca en Valencia de nuevo
y dice: “(los de mi familia)...siempre hemos vuelto a Valencia y la queremos
culta y libre”.
Y en Valencia se queda. Convoca el “Congreso Internacional de
Intelectuales y Artistas” de 1987 en conmemoración del celebrado también
en Valencia en 1937 durante la guerra civil, y crea la Filmoteca de
la Generalitat Valenciana. A partir de aquí ustedes ya conocen su trabajo
de los doce últimos años: la Filmoteca.
Insistía que “destruir una película no es un crimen, es un suicidio, es
destruir la memoria, y para conservar la memoria están las filmotecas,
los archivos del futuro..”
Crea una filmoteca perfectamente diseñada, con tres departamentos bien
59 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Ricardo Muñoz Suay
(Valencia 1917-1997).
The founder of the Filmothèque de la
Géneralitat Valenciana was born in 1917 to
an important Valencienne family
distinguished in politics and cultural circles.
Ricardo became a member of the Spanish
communist party and was totally involved in
politics and the Civil War, remaining six
years in hiding and three years in prison. In
prison and after, he became friends with all
the major cultural figures of Spanish
literature and cinema. He wrote at this time
«Canto al Cinéma », a prose poem
expressing his passion for cinema. in the
fifties, he began to work in film production
(the films are listed), with many of Spain’s
most notable directors, most often in the
position of assistant director, sometimes as
producer. In 1953, he began again to work
for the Communist Party, and organised,
with Jorge Semprún, an anti-Franco
resistance. During the sixties, he took up a
second occupation as an editor for several
publishing houses, again increasing his circle
of literary friends. In the eighties, he
returned to Valencia, and founded the
archive. His passion for archival work and
for the preservation of the cinematic heritage
ruled his life from then on.

Ricardo Muñoz Suay
(Valencia 1917-1997).
En 1932 Juan Piqueras - premier grand
critique espagnol - éveille l’intérêt de Muñoz
Suay aussi bien pour le cinéma que pour le
Parti communiste, auquel adhère Ricardo.
Après la guerre, il se cache, et connaît la
prison. Sa carrière cinématographique
débute en 1951 et il devient rapidement un
collaborateur (assistant réalisateur,
producteur exécutif, etc.) des plus
recherchés. Au début des années 70, il
abandonne la production pour se consacrer
à son autre grande passion : le monde de
l’édition et des livres. En 1962, il quitte le
Parti mais n’abandonne pas pour autant ses
inquiétudes politiques qu’il développe «
librement, parce que non sujettes à la
discipline » comme il aimait dire. Il travaille
avec Buñuel, Rosi, Antonioni, G. Rocha, G.
Rouquier, Zavattini, Berlanga, Bardem,
Klimovsky, Berry, Risi, Martin Patino,
Regueiro, G. Aragón et bien d’autres...
Parmi ses amis figurent Semprún, Sciascia,
Bergamín, Vargas Llosa, García Márquez,
Barral, Octavio Paz, José Donoso, Jorge
Edwards, Juan Marsé et d’autres
personnalités du cinéma et de la littérature.
Il crée la Filmoteca de la Generalitat
Valenciana en 1987 et la dirigera jusqu'à
son décès survenu le 2 août 1997. Son
dernier apport à la Filmoteca est la
présentation d’un projet de loi qui permet un
système administratif flexible et efficace
pour la Filmoteca. Le Gouvernement de
Valencia a appelé cette nouvelle entité «
Instituto de Cine Muñoz Suay ».
estructurados: Recuperación y conservación (para la adquisición, catalogación,
restauración y conservación del material fílmico),
Documentación y Publicaciones (adquisición, catalogación y conservación
de todo material cinematográfico en soporte papel, con biblioteca
pública; las ediciones de la Filmoteca; y la organización y coordinación
de seminarios y exposiciones) y, finalmente, Programación (ciclos de
películas en versión original). Muñoz Suay elevó esta filmoteca a miembro
de pleno derecho de la Federación Internacional de Archivos
Fílmicos y las publicaciones y campañas de recuperación que él creó ya
han merecido varios premios.
Su dedicación profesional hacia la Filmoteca fue completa y su preocupación
por la conservación del cine y de todo material audiovisual del
futuro, le llevó a dejar de lado otras “ocupaciones” que, a menudo, se le
pedían como escribir sus memorias, leer conferencias o presentar libros.
Su lucidez intelectual le hizo estar en la vanguardia de cualquier actividad
durante toda su vida y esa lucidez le hizo ver que “las filmotecas son
los archivos del futuro” por esto su dedicación última fue dotar a la filmoteca
del instrumento jurídico apropiado para afrontar ese futuro:
redactó el proyecto de ley del instituto de cine, para la Comunidad
Valenciana. Fue su último trabajo y, como todo lo que hacía, inteligente
y con porvenir, es decir, para siempre.
Para acabar este breve recordatorio creo que es necesario recordar las
palabras de Gabriel en el cuento ‘Los muertos’ de “Dublineses” de J.
Joyce que Ricardo transcribió en un artículo sobre Hammet, Hemingway
y Huston: “mejor pasar audaz al otro mundo en el apogeo de una
pasión, que marchitarse consumido funestamente por la vida”. La
película más fascinante para él fue esa última de Huston, precisamente
por ser la última -Ricardo también pensaba en un final próximo-, la que
representaba la vuelta a su origen -Irlanda para Huston, Valencia para
Ricardo- y porque, a través de Gabriel, se oyen las palabras que conformaron
la vida del joven enamorado de Joyce, de Huston y también de
Ricardo.
60 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

The Council of North-American
Film Archives - CNAFA
Mary Lea Bandy and Iván Trujillo Bolio
On March 7, 1998, the first annual meeting was held in Taxco, Mexico,
of CNAFA, or the Council of North American Film Archives/Consejo
Norteamericano de Archivos Fílmicos/Conseil nord-americain des
archives du film. Members are FIAF affiliates in Canada, the United
States, and Mexico. Iván Trujillo Bolio and his colleagues at the
Filmoteca de la UNAM organized the one-day session, which focussed
on issues of concern to regional and national archives in North America.
CNAFA offers a forum for discussion of projects and concerns of mutual
interest. Projects put forth include the development of an inventory of
Mexican films including US co-productions; potential CD-ROMs on
aspects of history, on cities, and for orientation for archivists; and the
creation of a pool of restored films for festivals whose theme is preservation.
Of particular concern are archival training initiatives such as the
Moving Image Archive degree program at UCLA and the L. Jeffrey
Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House, as well
as programs offered in Europe through the Archimedia project.
Archivists also recognized a need to develop and coordinate electronic
subtitling systems, and a request was put to Chema Prado, during the
FIAF Congress in Prague, to hold a demonstration of existing systems at
the Congress in Madrid in 1999.
Prior to the meeting in Taxco, archivists attended the opening of the new
Filmoteca facility on the UNAM campus in Mexico City. New offices,
study facilities, and a laboratory, centered on an open courtyard, comprise
the first stage of the two-storey building constructed adjacent to
climate-controlled vaults.
CNAFA members unanimously approved a proposal to meet annually in
Mexico, preferably during February. Additionally, CNAFA organized a
session at the Congress in Prague and will continue to meet each spring,
concurrent with other regional meetings during the Congress, as well as
invite all interested archivists to get together during the annual AMIA
meeting, to be held in 1998 in Miami.
The Filmoteca de la UNAM serves as secretariat, and The Museum of
Modern Art Department of Film and Video assists in keeping notes of
meetings.
61 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
International Groupings /
Groupements internationaux

Third Nordic Film Archives Meeting
Vigdis Lian
The third Nordic film archives meeting was held in Oslo in September
1997, after the first two meetings that were held in Stockholm and
Copenhagen. These meetings are meant to function both as a meeting
place for Nordic film archivists and as a forum for lectures and demonstrations
within the field of preservation and restoration.
This year part of the meeting was dedicated to sound systems from the
fifties (Cinerama 7 channel magnetic stereo sound system) untill today’s
advanced digital systems. The lecture, given by Torkell Saetervadet. p.t.
Service Engineer,SCPE, was well illustrated, and one was left with some
interesting questions, such as: has something been lost in the name of
the development ? More important, however, is the question of storage.
We don’t know for how long we can keep digital sound information
stored.
Tore Kinge, veteran documentary film maker told about his early year’ s
as a sound technician, also illustrated by film screenings. Torulf
Henriksen, representative of a private laboratory, Film Teknikk Norge,
lectured on the experiences gained in digital restoration. A faded animated
film (a puppet film from 1951) was used in the experience. The
conclusion so far is simple: it takes too many resources to make it
worthwhile for a private laboratory to continue to operate at this stage.
The Swedish Film Institute has the equipment to restore digitally, thanks
to government money granted especially for colourfilm restoration
(SESAM-project). The archive admits that so far very little of the investment
has paid off.
A common problem is the lack of profesional laboratories with the necessary
equipment (and personnel). The laboratory at NBR (National
Library, Rana) is equipped on a highly professional level and has the
potential to be in demand. Examples of restored colour films were
shown. All Nordic countries face the same reality: colour films are fading.
Without additional resources the risk of losing them permanently
is a great one. The problem must be raised on a principle level. The film
heritage is part of a nation’s cultural heritage, thus the question must be
on the political agenda.
In connection with restoration, ethical questions were discussed. We
want our films to be shown to the public. But the right equipment doesn’t
necessarily exit any longer. And when we restore, should we take
into consideration that the films will be shown to an audience of today,
or should we be strictly true to the original material ? This debate will
go on. Helsinki hosts the 1998 meeting, to which the Baltic countries
will be invited.
62 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

SEAPAVAA - Two Years on
Ray Edmondson
Readers will recall, in previous issues of JFP, reports on the ASEAN
Training Seminars for AV archivists held at the National Film and Sound
Archive in Canberra, and later on the establishment of the South East
Asia/Pacific AudioVisual Archive Association, which held its inaugral
conference in Manila, Philippines, in February 1996. Since then, annual
conferences have been held in Jakarta, Indonesia (March 1997) and
Hanoi, Vietnam (March 1998), this most recent event hosted by the
Vietnam Film Institute (see separate box). Membership has grown
steadily and a website and listserve established - if you haven’t yet seen
it, I commend the website at http://members.xoom.com/avarchives -
there you can read SEAPAVAA’s newletters, its constitution, get to know
its membership and how
to contact them.
What is SEAPAVAA and why is it needed? In a nutshell, let me describe
it:
- It relates to a specific, contiguous geographic region: South East Asia,
Australasia and the adjoining Pacific. Its agenda focusses on the needs
of these countries, which share particular climatic characteristics (most
are tropical) as well as economic, historical and political links. All full
members must be audiovisual archives located within this region: but
SEAPAVAA also welcomes associate members from anywhere in the
world.
- It provides a forum for organisations as well as functioning as a
professional association for individual practioners. Its constitution
specifically caters for this dual role (you can read the constitution on
the website). Membership is diverse: it embraces commercial as well as
non-commercial and cultural organsiations.
- It embraces all the audiovisual media: film, television, video, radio,
recorded sound.
- The promotion of audiovisual archiving, both as a profession and as
an important government priority, and the raising of public awareness,
is a central concern. In many countries, resources are limited,
audiovisual archiving still has a fairly short history, and large amounts
of the audiovisual heritage have already been lost. (It is hoped that
some material may survive elsewhere and, over time, can be
recovered).
- There is an emphasis on sharing, cooperation and self-help. This
includes an active approach to training, sharing of skills and
knowledge; the adoption of regionwide standards; the building of a
professional community and a communication network. The
development of a shared cataloguing database began late last year; a
63 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

workshop on vinegar syndrome (a major problem in the region) is
planned for this year.
- We are building a wider, global awareness of the audiovisual heritage
of the region, and facilitating access to it. (This was the theme of the
Hanoi conference this year.) For example, the Philippines has one of
the world’s most prolific film industries, Australia one of the oldest,
Vietnam (for linguistic reasons) one of the least known. A policy
statement on access was adopted in Hanoi: it covers the areas of legal
deposit, member cooperation, finance, and copyright.
Structurally, SEAPAVAA has an elected Executive Council of seven members,
four standing committees (Technical, Training, Collections,
Promotion) and a Secretariat based in Manila. It works to a three-year
business plan. The official language is English, which is the shared language
of trade and diplomacy within the region, Across the region, language
and culture is diverse and, in many cases, very ancient: a formal
SEAPAVAA occasion, such as a conference opening, to which everyone
wears national dress is a rich and colourful experience.
During the last year or so, after a period of sustained growth, many
countries in the region found themselves quite suddenly thrust into economic
crisis, as their currencies dropped in value. Nowhere in the
world, it seems, had economists predicted this: as I write, the effects
have been most tragically and dramatically felt in Indonesia, the most
populous country of the region. Governments have taken severe austerity
measures: it will be some time before recovery is complete. In these
circumstances, culturally vulnerable areas like audiovisual archiving are
early casualties.
Some SEAPAVAA members also have links to FIAF, IASA or other associations:
some have no other links. What they all find valuable within
SEAPAVAA are the distinctives of sharing in a focus on this particular
part of the world. Those from outside the region who’ve joined as associates
also enjoy that link: and their interest and desire to share in our task
is greatly welcomed. The field of audiovisual archiving is becoming a
more complex mosaic: the global movement.is the richer for it.
Highlights of the SEAPAVAA Conference,
Hanoi, Vietnam - 23-28 March
Emerging av heritage - accessing the voice and vision of
SE Asia-Pacific
Despite the current economic crisis in Asia - which unfortunately prevented
many intending delegates from travelling to Hanoi - this was the
largest SEAPAVAA conference to date: there were 44 official delegates
and observers from 13 countries, with around 80 to 100 attending the
symposium and official functions. The host was SEAPAVAA member, the
Vietnam Film Institute (VFI).
The venue was the superb new Horison Hotel in downtown Hanoi - an
excellent choice for an audiovisual conference. Sessions were presented
64 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

in English and Vietnamese, with simultaneous translation. Symposium
papers were available in hard-copy in both English and Vietnamese
translations.
The official opening, on the evening of Sunday 22 March, was honoured
by the participation of the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Pham Gia Khiem,
who gave the keynote address. Professor Tran Luan Kim, VFI Director,
welcomed the delegates and SEAPAVAA President, Ray Edmondson,
responded. It was a colourful occasion, with participants wearing their
national dress and an honour guard from Vietnam’s youth movement
presenting a bouquet of flowers to each foreign guest.
The conference got down to work at 8 am the following morning, as the
theme symposium began. Papers and presentations ranged over current
situation reports from various countries, a detailed coverage of AV
archiving activity in Vietnam, the newly-launched ASEAN AV database,
copyright and legal-deposit issues, a range of technical topics in audio,
video and film, and the promotion and delivery of access services. These
were interspersed with the sharing of case studies and “solutions that
worked”.
The General Assembly - the “annual general meeting” of SEAPAVAA -
took place in three sessions, the final one on the closing day, 28 March.
This embraced committee reports, the admission of new members, work
program and budget for the coming year, and other formal business. (In
accordance with regional practice, the minutes of the week’s proceedings
were reviewed and confirmed at this closing session).
As context to these two streams, a festival of films from the collections of
SEAPAVAA members was publicly presented at the VFI’s cinema, and a
presentation by historians David Hannan (Australia) and Augustin Sotto
(Philippines) offered an overview, in contemporary film clips, of the
emergence of S E Asia from colonialism during the first 70 years of this
century.
Participants gained a taste of Vietnam though a performance at the
famed Water Puppet theatre, a presentation of traditional Vietnamese
music, a visit to the house of President Ho Chi Minh (a historic site) and
an excursion to Ha Long Bay, a breathtaking UNESCO World Heritage
site which participants toured by boat. There was also a tour of the VFI’s
building in Hanoi, including its storage vaults and newly-installed
telecine chain. (With a substantial operation also in Ho Chi Minh City,
the VFI is one of the largest AV archives in S E Asia/Pacific).
One important and visible outcome of the conference was the adoption
of a policy statement (SEAPAVAA’s first) on the subject of Access - which
will be circulated separately. Another will be the production of a succinct
history of the cinemas of S E Asian countries, to be published by VFI at
the end of 1988. A third is the strengthening of committee activity (SEA-
PAVAA now has 4 standing committees: Collections, Technical, Training,
Promotion/Communication).
65 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

CLAIM Meeting celebrated in Praha
Iván Trujillo Bolio
In spite of the distance, at the 54 FIAF’s Congress, held in Praha, the
attendance of Latin American Film Archives was numerous, so we could
have a brief meeting of the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Archivos
de Imàgnes en Moviemiento (CLAIM) in which were present the representatives
of the following film archives: Argentina, Brasil, Colombia
(Barranquilla), Cuba, Chile, Mèxico (Cineteca Nacional y Filmoteca
UNAM), Puerto Rico, y Uruguay (Cinemateca Uruguaya).
Taking advantage of this meeting it was delivered to each archive a copy
of the FIAF’s Catalogation Rules, in Spanish, which has been recently
issued, and we have the compromise to send more copies to each
archive as well as to the members that could’nt attend.
Regarding the funds of the Instituto de Cooperaciòn Iberoamericana
(ICI) it was decided to use them to take care of the following projects: to
acquire the splicer for the Cinemateca Cubana and the PTR rolls for the
archives which still don’t get them, for example the National Archive of
Puerto Rico; to support the applications of the Latin American representatives
to attend to the FIAF Summer School; to give the resources to finish
the restoration of the film “Très tristes tigres” that it is doing in Chile
and Uruguay; to make the transfer of nitrate images into acetate of Costa
Rica, Guatemala, Perù and Sao Paulo Archives.
It was taken into consideration the importance of that in the next
Congress, to be held in Madrid, participate the greatest number of Latin
American film archives. As regards to, Chema Prado expressed that he is
making negotiations to obtain the support to cover the travel and loadging
expenses up to ten representatives of Latin America. At last, it was
requested to him that we would like to count, within the Congress, with
two sessions to screen the films, that has been restored with the ICI’s
funds.
Association des Cinémathèques
Européennes - ACE
José Manuel Costa
Including now 31 formal members, ACE has been continuously growing
and widening its scope of activity. Dating back to the middle eighties,
the European associative movement has reached high momentum
between 1991 and 1995, with the LUMIÈRE Project - an initiative of the
European Union FIAF archives benefitting from the support of the
MEDIA Programme, which came to an end because of the new rules of
66 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

this Programme. Facing the new context, the movement had then a decisive
turning point in September 1996, in S. Sebastian, where we have
decided to open up the Association already existant under the name of
ACCE (Association des Cinémathèques de la Communauté Européenne)
to the whole of Europe, thus creating ACE. And, by that time, we
decided to start a “trial period” of eighteen months, with a new formal
structure (including the payment of a regular fee for secretarial
expenses), aiming to clarify the real potential and practical possibilities
of this movement, now dispossessed of any guarantee of continuous
external support.
The “trial period” having now reached its end, ACE has just made its
final balance in the recent General Assembly in Prague, by the occasion
of the 1998 FIAF Congress. This was in fact the most participated G.A
ever made (where all formal members were present, plus many other
observers) and, in face of the results obtained, the members expressed
an unanimous wish to go on with the association.
Besides the internal discussion on its structure and scope, ACE has concentrated
on two main levels of activity: the launching of collective projects
in various professional archive fields; the external representation of
the film archives and the dialogue with other european institutions. And
in both of them, during the last two years we could register tangible
progress.
First of all, ACE resumed activity concerning two previous LUMIÈRE
initiatives, which either remained unfinished or claimed for natural further
development. These were the JEF project (Joint European
Filmography) and the SEARCH FOR LOST FILMS. So far, the european
filmography had in fact encountered some technical problems regarding
the merge of the various software used by some archives and institutions,
along with clear delay in the development of some national filmographies.
However, by the time this bulletin is published, a first
experimental CD-Rom with the data received so far is expected to have
been sent to all members. As for the SEARCH, under the coordination of
Gianluca Farinelli and Vittorio Martinelli, we have managed to approve
some further support by the European Commission, through the
RAPHAEL Programme, which enabled new identification operations.
And, following these actions and support, ACE approved to internally
finance new actions to be carried out during the course of 1998.
Updated lists of lost films and of recently identified material have already
circulated and are available to all FIAF members in Bologna through
Coordinator Gianluca Farinelli.
As for collective projects launched since the end of LUMIÈRE, we have
diversified the areas of activity, including now the decisive area of training
and some technical research projects coordinated by the european
GAMMA group, based in Bologna.
Training has in fact become a new major concern for ACE. With the support
of MEDIA II, we have launched ARCHIMEDIA, a joint initiative of
European Union film archives and some of the major European univer-
67 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

sity film departments, divided into two parallel, complementary initiatives,
both organized on a one year basis: the initial training sessions (for
students with at least a three year course on film studies and for young
professionals) and the seminars/workshops for professionals. The basic
idea is to respond to specific training needs of film archives and other
professionals having to deal with the “film heritage” in whatever condition
(practical or theoretical). The main objective is to change empiric,
self-apprenticeship training systems into a real professional approach, or,
ultimately, to contribute to change an area of film activity into a real profession.
In the technical research area ACE archives launched the projects FILM
ARCHIVES ON LINE and ALL THE COLOURS OF THE WORLD, both
coordinated by the GAMMA Group (an independent group gathering
conservation/restoration experts of film archives and of film laboratories
dealing with research on these areas). The former is a three year project
co-financed by the E.U. Programme LEONARDO, aiming to create and
make available on a wide basis new training and research tools. The latter
is a shorter (one year) research project on tinting and toning techniques
and restoration co-financed by CALEIDOSCOPE.
Concerning the external representation, ACE has been in as many
European forums as possible, and has opened new areas of dialogue with
other professional film associations. On this level, we should stress the
presence on the annual Strasbourg Forum of European Cinema (the first
two years, 1996 and 1997), the meetings held in the context of the
Festivals of S.Sebastian and Berlin, the presence in the Eureka meeting in
Sitges last October 1997 and the meetings and contacts with FERA
(Fédération Européenne des Réalisateurs de l´Audiovisuel) namely in
order to discuss possible joint actions in favour of the preservation of the
film heritage.
Last but not the least, responding to the interest of its members, ACE
has now also opened dialogue with FIAPF (Fédération Internationale des
Associations de Producteurs de Films) in order to possibly achieve adequate
new models for the voluntary deposit of films in most countries..
Through all these activities, we are therefore consolidating the
Association as a growing, permanent continental structure for the development
of the preservation and valorization of the film heritage.
68 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

Uncharted territory:
Essays on early non-fiction film
Contributions were written by: Tom Gunning, Martin Loiperdinger, Heide
Schlupmann, Roland Cosandey, Mark-Paul Meyer, Hartmut Bitomsky, Jennifer
Peterson, Thierry Lefebvre, Daan Hertogs, Nicholas Hiley and William
Uricchio. Edited by Daan Hertogs & Nico de Klerk. Amsterdam (Nederlands
Filmmuseum) 1997. 132 pages with colour and b&w illustrations, Price:
27,50 Dfl.
A ‘spin-off’ of two events on early non-fiction film organized at the
Nederlands Filmmuseum: the 1st Amsterdam Workshop on early nonfiction
film (1994) and a workshop led by German filmmaker/essayist
Hartmut Bitomsky (1995). This book contains original contributions as
well as a couple of thoroughly rewritten versions of earlier published
articles. Various Amsterdam Workshop participants have developed ideas
and suggestions that the editors felt didn’t always make it to the mainstream
of the workshop discussions into essays.
Pierre Hébert, l’homme animé
par Marcel Jean, Montréal, Les 400 coups, 1996, 223 p., ill.
Publié à l’occasion de la sortie de La Plante humaine, premier long
métrage de l ‘animateur québécois, le très beau livre de Marcel Jean est
tout à la fois essai, portrait, biographie, anthologie, entretien, etc. Cette
approche éclatée convient parfaitement à l’œuvre multiple de Pierre
Hébert.
Auteur de plus de vingt films (depuis 1962), Hébert a aussi été associé
fréquemment en tant qu’animateur au travail de cinéastes de prises de
vues réelles, en fiction (Carle, Leduc, Lefebvre), comme en documentaire
(Bélanger, Rached). Héritier direct de Norman McLaren, virtuose du
dessin sur pellicule, son œuvre, éminemment personnelle, est tout
entière sous le signe de l’expérimentation, tout en demeurant fréquemment
politique ou sociale, et toujours poétique.
Passionné de peinture et de musique, Hébert a fréquemment été le compagnon
de route de musiciens improvisateurs, allant même jusqu’à créer
des concerts-événements (ou « performances ») au cours desquels il réalisait
à chaud de petits films dessinés directement sur la pellicule grâce à
un dispositif de son invention et selon une technique digne du trapèze
volant.
Egalement collaborateur de chorégraphes canadiens, américains et
français, Hébert est enfin un cinéaste qui a beaucoup écrit sur son travail
et sur le cinéma d’animation en général.
Lui-même homme-orchestre (critique, cinéaste, professeur, éditeur, etc.),
Marcel Jean1 a créé à partir et autour de son sujet un livre-guide qui
nous entraîne à travers l’œuvre d’Hébert, de surprise en surprise, avec un
69 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
A l’origine de cet ouvrage : le
premier Atelier d’Amsterdam
de films de non-fiction de 1994
et une rencontre organisée par
Hartmut Bitomsky en 1995. Ce
livre présente les exposés ainsi
que des documents publiés
précédemment révisés.
Punto de partida de esta
publicación : el primer Taller
de Amsterdam de películas de
no-ficcion organizado en 1994
y el encuentro organizado por
Hartmut Bitomsky en 1995. El
libro presenta las ponencias y
documentos publicados
precedentemente actualizados.
Publications
Pierre Hébert, l’homme animé
Publicado en ocasión del estreno de La
Plante humaine, primer largo-metraje del
director de cine de animación quebequense,
el admirable libro de Marcel Jean es a la vez
ensayo, retrato, biografía, antología y
entrevista con el cineasta. Este enfoque
múltiple corresponde a una obra tan diversa
- experimental, marcada tanto por
contenido político y social, siempre poética -
como la de Pierre Hébert.

1. Marcel Jean est également l’auteur d’un
essai remarquable sur le cinéma
d’animation, Le Langage des lignes (Les
400 coups, Montréal, 1995).
plaisir toujours renouvelé. La qualité des textes du cinéaste, très astucieusement
intégrés au parcours que l’auteur nous propose, est pour
beaucoup dans le succès de l’entreprise. Le livre est abondamment (et
intelligemment) illustré, ce qui ajoute encore au plaisir de la lecture
active que nous propose Marcel Jean.
Robert Daudelin
Psycho. De la figure au musée imaginaire :
théorie et pratique de l’acte de spectature
par Martin Lefebvre. Montréal / Paris, Harmattan, 1997, 253p.
ISBN : 2-89489-035-4
Depuis les années quatre-vingt, la réflexion théorique et historique sur le
cinéma au Québec a fait d’énormes progrès. De plus en plus d’individus
acquièrent leur doctorat et leurs thèses font à l’occasion l’objet de publications.
Le monde des études cinématographiques et des cinémathèques
en particulier connaît bien les travaux d’André Gaudreault sur le cinéma
des premiers temps. Mais il n’est pas le seul au Québec à publier le fruit
de ses recherches. En 1996-97, deux livres sont parus qui apportent leur
contribution à la compréhension du fonctionnement du dispositif filmique.
Le premier, celui de Jean Châteauvert, porte sur Des mots à
l’image. La voix over au cinéma (Méridiens Klincksieck / Nuit blanche éditeur,
1996).
Mais je voudrais parler plutôt de l’ouvrage de Martin Lefebvre sur la
spectature. Déjà le mot peut rebuter dans sa nouveauté. Disons, pour
faire bref, que la spectature est au spectateur ce que la lecture est au lecteur
: « un acte à travers quoi le spectateur met à jour des informations
filmiques, les organise, les assimile, les intègre à l’ensemble des savoirs,
des imaginaires. » Lefebvre part d’une séquence de Psycho, le célèbre
meurtre sous la douche, et réfléchit sur la représentation imaginaire et
mémorielle qui l’a impressionné. Bref il se questionne sur ce qu’il retient
de ce film, de cette séquence. Mais avant d’arriver, à la page 121, à l’analyse
de la séquence elle-même, il va, au cours des deux premiers chapitres
(« Le parti pris de la spectature » et « De la forme »), préciser dans
le détail le cadre conceptuel à l’intérieur duquel il mène sa démarche.
Dans cette entreprise, Lefebvre convie tout autant Peter Kubelka
qu’Eisenstein, le pragmatisme de Charles Sanders Peirce que la rhétorique
de Cicéron et la sémiotique d’Umberto Eco. Cette partie de l’ouvrage
intéressera beaucoup ceux qui s’interrogent sur la façon dont un
film produit du sens, sur la manière dont un spectateur l’interprète et en
construit des figures. Ils trouveront éclairantes les notations sur les processus
qui définissent l’acte de spectature et balisent l’émergence du sens,
à savoir les processus perceptif, cognitif, argumentatif, affectif et symbolique.
Cette « pentade » ne laisse pas d’en évoquer une autre, célèbre :
celle d’Eisenstein dans « Méthodes de montage » (Le film, son sens, sa
70 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

forme), sauf que celle-ci est définie de la perspective inverse, celle de la
mise en forme du sens par le cinéaste. Le lecteur ne manquera pas non
plus de porter une attention particulière aux unités cognitives qui permettent
au spectateur de comprendre l’à-propos d’un film et de
construire sa forme narrative. Lefebvre propose quelques concepts
(script, scène, « Memory Organisation Packet ») qui gouvernent la mise
en formes du film et conséquemment l’émergence de la figure, notion-clé
pour l’auteur car elle ouvre sur la mémoire et l’imaginaire.
C’est alors que Lefebvre entre dans la deuxième partie de son livre, les
deux derniers chapitres. Il y va d’abord, au chapitre trois, d’un examen
détaillé de la séquence du meurtre sous la douche et des multiples interprétations
qu’elle fait surgir. Cet examen peut étonner dans la mesure où
Lefebvre met à jour des chaînes sémiotiques auxquelles probablement
beaucoup de spectateurs n’ont jamais songé : alimentation, couteau, cannibalisme,
pomme de douche, corps-tuyau, orifices, configurations érotiques,
appétit sexuel, et j’en passe. Ce processus de complexification est
mis en lumière de façon exemplaire dans l’analyse de treize pages que fait
Lefebvre d’un tableau qui n’apparaît à l’écran qu’un tout petit moment :
Suzanne et les vieillards, et dont il conclut que ce que nous voyons en fait,
c’est Marion et les vieillards.
Le chapitre quatre devrait fasciner les cinéphiles et particulièrement ceux
qui travaillent dans les cinémathèques. En effet, sous le titre « De la série
comme musée imaginaire » (s’inspirant par là de la notion mise de l’avant
par André Malraux), Lefebvre étudie tous les sequels de Psycho ainsi que
tous les films où la figure du meurtre sous la douche est reprise presque
sous le mode du remake. Au total, il examine dix-huit films (où se retrouvent
notamment De Palma, Carpenter ou De Vito) qui constituent, je
dirais, la série figurale rapprochée de Psycho (car l’auteur nomme d’autres
titres qu’il avait placés dans sa série en fouillant dans sa mémoire filmique).
En conclusion, on peut dire que pour Lefebvre, la spectature est un acte
individuel dont la « richesse » repose sur le savoir encyclopédique, culturel
et social du spectateur, sur sa mémoire, sur son imaginaire. Il plaide
en définitive pour une approche subjective du sens afin de prendre en
compte au plan théorique des aspects de l’expérience filmique dont ne
tiennent pas compte les autres approches du cinéma (études intertextuelles,
par genre, par thème, etc.). Je ne peux affirmer que je partage
tout à fait le point de vue de l’auteur car j’estime que si le spectateur
construit le sens d’un film, il existe d’autres facteurs « objectifs » qui le
construisent aussi. Mais je reconnais que l’ouvrage de Lefebvre nous
oblige à interroger le spectateur du point de vue de la construction par
sédimentation des interprétations et, en termes plus circonscrits mais
tout aussi fascinants au plan individuel, à nous interroger sur notre
propre cinéphilie, sa profondeur, les réseaux qu’elle tisse. On a tous son
propre musée imaginaire, sa propre cinémathèque imaginaire. N’arrive-til
pas parfois que les projections d’une cinémathèque en constitue un
écho public ?
Pierre Véronneau
71 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
About « spectation »...
« Spectation »... is to spectator what lecture
is to lector... This is how Pierre Véronneau
summarises the notion that Martin Lefebvre
defines in the 120 first pages of his book,
and which he then illustrates - in the last
three chapters - analysing in all its
dimensions the famous murder under the
shower, that seems to have left deep
impression in his memory...
A propósito de la « espectadura »...
La espectadura es al espectador lo que la
lectura es al lector... Así resume Pierre
Veronneau la noción introducida en unas
cientoveinte páginas por Martin Lefebvre en
su libro, y que luego ilustra analizando - en
très capítulos finales - el célebre asesinato
bajo la ducha, en todos sus dimensiones, que
tan profundas huellas ha dejado en su
memoria...

AFI : catalogue de films ethnoaméricains.
Le NCFVP de l’AFI vient de publier son
dernier catalogue de films de fiction. Le
volume s’intitule Within Our Gates :
Ethnicity in American Feature Films, 1911-
1960, et fournit de l’information détaillée sur
2.464 films dans lesquels l’approche de
l’identité ethnique américaine est déterminante.
Ses 1.571 pages contiennent les films
produits aux Etats-Unis, ou à l’étranger par
des compagnies américaines, et sortis en salle
aux Etats-Unis. Plus de 900 éléments
n’avaient jamais été répertoriés dans la
célèbre série des catalogues AFI auparavant.
AFI : Catálogo de filmes etnoamericanos.
El NCFVP del AFI acaba de editar su último
catálogo: Within Our Gates: Ethnicity in
American Feature Films, 1911-1960. Este,
proporciona informaciones detalladas sobre
2.464 filmes cuyo enfoque principal es la
identidad étnica americana. En 1.571
paginas se describen todas las películas
producias en los Estados Unidos, o el el
extranjero por compañías americanas, exhibidas
públicamente en los EE-UU. Más de
900 elementos no habían sido publicados
nunca en la célebre serie de catálogos del
AFI.
Rencontres autour des inédits
L’Association Européenne des Inédits publie
un ensemble d’essais consacrés au film
d’amateurs. Le terme inédits désigne les
images en mouvement évoquant tout aspect
de la vie de nos sociétés, d’hier et
d’aujourd’hui, réalisées sur des formats et
supports qui, à l’origine, n’étaient pas
destinées à une diffusion dans les circuits
professionnels de l’audiovisuel. Rencontres
autour des inédits présente une grande
variété de réflexions qu’inspirent aujourd’hui
les films amateurs. L’ouvrage présente une
approche interdisciplinaire et originale de la
pratique cinématographique amateur d’avant
la vidéo, qui permet d’élargir l’étude
strictement historique des documents. Ecrit
dans un style direct, le livre propose la
découverte étonnante et pleine de surprises
d’un univers cinématographique particulier.
AFI publishes catalog on Ethnic-american films
The American Film Institute’s National Center for Film and Video
Preservation has published the newest entry in the AFI Catalog of
Feature Films. The special single-volume Catalog is entitled Within Our
Gates: Ethnicity in American Feature Films, 1911-1960, and provides
detailed information on 2,464 films in which American ethnic identity is
a significant focus. The 1,571-page book includes all features produced
in the U.S. or abroad by U.S. companies that received public exhibition,
including many documentaries and educational films. Over 900 of the
entries have never before been published in the Catalog series.
The title Within Our Gates is taken from the 1920 feature directed by
Oscar Micheaux – the earliest-surviving film by this pioneering African-
American filmmaker – and reflects the experiences of the many ethnic
groups that came to the United States. The volume documents the extraordinary
cultural diversity of American film production, including the
nearly 300 American features that were produced by and for immigrant
populations in 18 foreign languages. The work is indexed by Chronology,
Personal Name, Subject, Ethnic Category, and Foreign Language. Of particular
interest is the Ethnic Category Index, which lists the films within
more that 110 ethnic groupings, including every identifiable Native
American tribe.
Within Our Gates was edited by Alan Gevinson, working with Catalog
executive editor Patricia King Hanson and the AFI Catalog staff. Funding
was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts (through the AFI
Preservation Challenge grant), the National Endowment for the
Humanities, and Bank of America. As with other AFI Catalog volumes,
Within Our Gates is available through the University of California Press.
Gregory Lukow
Jubilee Book. Essays on Amateur Film /
Rencontres autour des Inédits
Edited by Association Européenne Inédit (AEI), 1997. ISBN 2-9600153-0-4,
144pp. ill. 750BEF + mail and banking costs. RTBF, Passage de la Bourse, B-
6000 Charleroi
This collection of 14 essays on amateur film celebrates the achievements
of the European Association Inédits (AEI) over the past six years. The
word inédits (or amateur) refers to informal moving images evoking any
and every aspect of life, both past and present, produced on a whole
range of formats and gauges for private use. The principles underlying
the AEI are based on the knowledge that the testimony hidden in nonprofessional
film adds an extra dimension to our audiovisual heritage and
to the collective memory of our societies.
Essays on Amateur Film reflects a wide spectrum of thoughts and
approaches towards amateur film, focusing on both the solely family film
and the more sophisticated hobby film. The publication proposes an
72 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

original interdisciplinary approach concentrating primarily on film from
the pre-video era, which enlarges the strictly historical research of documents.
To complement this scholarly approach, a number of the authors have
written interesting and lively accounts describing the special characteristics
and the potential of inédits film in the context of national, regional or
local film archive collections and as footage for television productions.
Articles based on the writers’ personal experiences come from countries
and regions as diverse as Belgium, Brittany, Canada, Denmark, the
Netherlands, Scotland and the United States. This well-presented book is
illustrated with numerous old documents that bring the films – and the
subject matter – to life.
Essays on Amateur Film is essential reading for film archivists, historians,
researchers and television producers, yet its eminent readability makes it
accessible to nonprofessionals as well.
Footage: The Worldwide Moving Image
Sourcebook
New York, Second Line Search, 1997, 1098p.
Avec l’explosion des chaînes spécialisées de télévision, la production
grandissante de cédéroms multimédia, le développement des recherches
historiques en cinéma, la demande pour des images d’archives se fait de
plus en plus pressante. Parallèlement à ce besoin de l’industrie se trouve
un nombre important de dépositaires de plans d’archives qui pour des
raisons politiques et économiques désirent faire connaître leur fonds documentaire.
Le débat contradictoire qui existe depuis longtemps dans les
archives entre montrer et conserver se résout graduellement en une
volonté grandissante de donner accès aux collections.
Dans ce contexte une liste d’institutions possédant des fonds de plans
d’archives devient un précieux instrument de travail pour les bibliothécaires
et archivistes qui sont sur la ligne de feu pour répondre au
repérage des documents d’archives.
C’est le pari que veut tenir Footage: The Worldwide Moving Image Sourcebook.
Le projet est ambitieux et se veut une version augmentée et mise à
jour de Footage 89/91 qui avait fortement été apprécié il y a quelques
années.
S’adressant non seulement aux professionnels de l’image, mais à toute
personne désireuse de se procurer des séquences animées, le répertoire
est édité par une solide équipe de collaborateurs, institutions et associations
; il offre une liste mondiale d’institutions possédant des fonds
d’archives, leur description, les conditions pour y avoir accès, les personnes
à contacter et les conditions pour libérer les droits s’il y a lieu. Un
index de plus de 10.000 sujets facilite la recherche des images désirées.
Quelques articles d’information faisant le point sur la situation des plans
d’archives et la conservation des films complètent ce guide qu’on peut
facilement qualifier d’indispensable à la recherche.
René Beauclair
73 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Encuentros sobre inéditos
La Asociación Europea de Inéditos publica
un conjunto de ensayos sobre el cine
amateur. Este término designa todo tipo de
imágenes en movimiento que evocan algún
aspecto de nuestras sociedades, de ayer y de
hoy, creadas en formatos que en su orígen
no estaban destinadas a una difusión a
través de circuitos profesionales del
audiovisual. Rencontres autour des inédits
presenta diversas reflecciones inspiradas por
el cine amateur. El libro propone un enfoque
interdisciplinario y original de la práctica
cinematográfica amateur anterior al vídeo
que va más allá que el mero estudio
histórico de los documentos. Escrito en un
estilo directo, invita a descubrir un universo
cinematográfico particular.

La Crise des Cinémathèques ... et du monde
by Raymond Borde and Freddy Buache, with an afterword by Dominique Païni.
Lausanne, L’Age d’Homme, 1997, 109 pages.
This little book is a polemic about the situation of film archives on the
eve of the millennium. It may give the lay reader a feeling that he has
come in on a conversation that has been going on long before he arrived
in the room.
You should not expect an impartial review from me of a book whose
authors are respected and admired colleagues with whom I shared forty
years of working to save the cinematic heritage. Raymond Borde, founder
of the Cinémathèque de Toulouse, and Freddy Buache, former director of
the Cinémathèque Suisse, join in a spirited discussion of the current state
of film archives, with much regret for lost values. Dominique Païni, the
current director of the Cinémathèque Française, has added a calm afterword
that sometimes contradicts the positions of Borde and Buache.
Borde provides the chief arguments of the book. He gives a brief summary
of the founding archives of FIAF and the proliferation of this movement
to today’s 120 archives in 68 countries. He regrets that most
archives are now ruled in the name of efficiency, according to his view, by
soulless administrators, in contrast to the original heroic and passionate
founders. Nevertheless, he finds some changes for the good. He is glad to
see the old secrecy about the collections to be fading away, and he thinks
that the existence of films in several archives (where once they were
unique copies) provides more security. It seems that now, in some countries,
at least, film archives are recognized as national institutions on a
level with art museums and national theaters.
However, Borde finds that archives are in a state of crisis at several points.
One is the money given to archives for their work. Not too little, he
seems to say, but too much : the huge state subsidies bring in the accountants
and administrators who have no knowledge of the profession, yet
sometimes try to make or overrule archival decisions. He is also concerned
that some unnamed archives are wasteful of these funds, spending
on nonessential activities and staff, and urges that the budgetary priority
must always be the archival tasks. We must agree with that. There is no
doubt that the bureaucracy that comes with receiving grants and subsidies
is an annoying load onto the daily tasks of an archivist. In my part of
the world, however, we would be content to take these problems along
with the money. Have not the film archivists struggled all these years to
get to this point?
The second point of crisis is that the rights holders have become active,
now that old films are once again worth money to them. This has greatly
increased demands for access on the film archive. Borde believes that the
new generation of archivists are dominated by what he calls the « Anglo-
Saxon ideology », which acts in strict observance of the property laws (as
some early archives always did, I might add), as opposed to the romantic
old pirates of yore, and suspects the new archivists would not even know
how to say no to a claimant for a unique film copy in their collection. I
74 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

think the reverse is true: archivists are in a much stronger position to say
no today when it is necessary to save a film. Borde does see the benefits
of the new situation: archives finally have gained the confidence of the
producers, which has greatly enriched the collections.
The third point, perhaps the most significant in the book, is the proliferation
of moving images through television and in the easy availability of
film reproductions on video. This means that archives must look at the
goals of their archive projections (and all of their means of providing
access) in a different light. All three archivists seem to fear the impact of
a broad audience experienced in viewing images, which seems to me to
be contradictory because our profession is mainly concerned with the
popular culture. For Dominique Païni, the exhibition program should
serve an educational function, to help spectators bring knowledge to the
mass of moving images now so easily available to them. For Borde, as for
Buache, there is inspiration in Langlois’s famous statement about his satisfaction
in showing a rare film in an empty theater to an audience of two
or three. Borde says that a balance must be found between educating the
mass public and the needs of the few. In fact, the archives’ audiences
have always been very small and specialized and still are, when compared
with the mass audiences for film and television. Whatever the level
of the public’s intellectual appreciation of cinema, in my opinion we
should be glad to welcome a new audience with a knowledge of moving
images of past times, at least in the form of video reproduction. The
problem is that the vast majority of young people in the United States,
and I suppose elsewhere, have seen only video reproductions of films
older than a year, if indeed they have seen the originals at all, but
nonetheless know much more of their cinematic heritage in this limited
way than past generations. We are now at a point similar to that time
when the first film archive movement found its inspiration in the disappearance
of silent films. Today, the vanishing of the original film viewing
experience is the real crisis. Our mission for the new century should be
to find more ways to show these young audiences the real experience of
cinema.
Borde points to the wide proliferation of film archives as an important
change for FIAF. He remembers when some members wanted to limit
membership in the federation in order to retain the ideal model of an
archive and, let us remember, to gain the confidence of the producers.
However, here is a change which Borde heartily approves, and FIAF itself
no longer worries about, because an acceptance of varied models of
archives has strengthened the archive movement. As well, it has insured
the preservation of moving images that had escaped the major archives.
Cooperation among regional archives and national archives has proved
highly productive. He also speaks for open catalogs and FIAF’s project for
an international data bank of holdings. Now that the collections have
become so large, he urges that archives must provide for exploration of
them. Borde remembers the thrill of discovery in ash cans, garages and
flea markets in the early days. In fact, the thrill is still very much alive on
the archive’s shelves, where vast collections wait for review. He insists,
and I would agree, on the right of historians to know about the availabil-
75 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998

Dark Red pH 6,0
No Smell
Brown pH 5,0
No Smell
ity of all the materials in their field of study. In an annex that seems
oddly out of place in the midst of all this, Borde argues for the retention
of dubbed film copies. In my opinion, this is one of the most valuable
contributions of the book. He has made me rethink this question.
Freddy Buache, on the other hand, seems to be almost entirely pessimistic
about the new situation of film archives. Like Borde, he laments
the passing of the days when the passion for cinema was the only
weapon for saving our cinematic heritage. He does not think that the
functionaries who lead most of the world’s film archives today can understand
that. I believe that more often than Buache or Borde would admit,
the new breed of professional film archivist may be moved by the same
passions as the founders. Even the bureaucrats and accountants he scorns
may sometimes be brought to share these enthusiasms. As someone who
went through several different administrations, I always thought of it as
one of my tasks to educate the new administrator. Buache does not care
much for the current interest in film reconstruction, nor does he approve
of the new methods in scholarship of the universities, nor the early film
studies that were launched at the 1978 FIAF Congress in Brighton and
continue actively today, nor the state of the world in general. While there
are times when I can understand his criticism, for me, his viewpoint is
too narrow, and too romantic. We must not forget the magnificent
achievements of the past - how could we, they are on the shelves, in the
vaults. But while the fundamental values of preserving the heritage do
not and must never change, a broader sense of the archives’ mission is
needed to face the next century. The personalities of the founders created
the institution but it is the institution that survives us all.
Eileen Bowser
Motion Picture Film Base Deterioration Window for Acetate and Nitrate Film
Dancan International Sales • www.dancan.dk • dancan@email.dk • Fax +45 4054 4180
Light Brown pH 4,8
No Smell
Light Yellow pH 4,6
Weak Smell
76 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Yellow pH 4,4
Strong Smell
Yellow pH 4,2
Strong Smell
Yellow pH >4,0
Strong Smell

FIAF Bookshop / Librairie FIAF
FIAF publications available from the FIAF Secretariat,
1 rue Defacqz, 1000 Brussels, Belgium
Periodical Publications /
Publications périodiques
Journal of Film Preservation
(previously FIAF Bulletin)
Published twice a year by FIAF Brussels
Biannual subscription (4 issues): 1.750 BF,
50 US$
International FilmArchive Cd-Rom
The FIAF FilmArchive CD-ROM is the easiest
to use and the most authoritative film
reference CD-ROM on the market. The only
CD-ROM produced by THE INTERNA-
TIONAL FEDERATION OF FILM
ARCHIVES, the world’s leading experts in
film research and archive science, which
includes the database of film holdings in
FIAF archives and the International Index
to Film/TV Periodicals from 1978 to present;
Bibliography of FIAF Members’ Publications;
International Directory of Film
and TV Documentation Collections etc.
Annual subscription (two disks, Spring/
Autumn, updating all files) 295 GB£,
460 US$, 17.700 BF
General Subjects / Ouvrages généraux
Manuel des archives du film / A Handbook
for Film Archives
Manuel de base sur le fonctionnement d’une
archive de films. Edité par Eileen Bowser et
John Kuiper.
Basic manual on the functioning of a film
archive. Edited by Eileen Bowser and John
Kuiper.
FIAF 1980. 151p. illus.: 1.190 BF, 34 US$
(either French or English version)
50 Ans d’Archives dé Film 1938-1988 /
50 Years of Film Archives
Annuaire de la FIAF publié pour son 50ième
anniversaire, contenant une description de ses
78 membres et observateurs et un compte
rendu historique de son développement.
FIAF yearbook published for the 50th
anniversary, containing descriptions of its
78 members and observers and a historical
account of its development.
FIAF 1988, 203p. illus.: 1.120 BF, 32 US$
Rediscovering the Role of Film Archives:
to Preserve and to Show
Proceedings of the FIAF Symposium held in
Lisboa, 1989. FIAF 1990, 143p.: 1.250 BF,
35 US$
Technical Subjects /
Ouvrages techniques
Technical Manual of the FIAF Preservation
Commission / Manuel technique de la
Commission de Préservation
(containing loose-leaf publications in
English and French)
A user’s manual on practical film and video
preservation procedures.
(classeur contenant des articles en français et
en anglais régulièrement mis à jour)
Un manuel sur les procédés pratiques de
préservation du film et de la vidéo.
FIAF 192p. by end 1993, 2.700 BF, 77 US$
or 3.700 BF, 105 US$ incl. “Physical
Characteristics of Early Films as Aid to
Identification.”
Handling, Storage and Transport of
Cellulose Nitrate Film
Guidelines produced with help of the FIAF
Preservation Commission. FIAF 1992, 20p.:
700 BF, 20US$
Preservation and Restoration of Moving
Images and Sound
A report by the FIAF Preservation Commission,
covering in 19 chapters the physical
properties of film and sound tape, their
handling and storage, and the equipment
used by film archives to ensure for permanent
preservation. FIAF 1986, 268p. illus.
1.750 BF, 50 US$
Physical Characteristics of Early Films as
Aids to Identification
by Harold Brown. Documents some features
such as camera and printer apertures, edge
marks, shape and size of perforations, trade
marks, etc. in relation to a number of the
early film producing companies. Written for
the FIAF Preservation Commission. 1980,
81p. illus.: 1.650 BF, 47 US$
Cataloguing - Documentation /
Catalogage - Documentation
Glossary of Filmographic Terms
A polyglot dictionary (English, French,
German, Spanish, Russian) with definition
of film and television credits terms.
Compiled by Jon Gartenberg, FIAF 1985,
141p.: 1.190 BF, 34 US$
Glossary of Filmographic Terms, version 2
This new edition includes terms and
indexes in English, French, German,
Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese,
Dutch, Italian, Czech, Hungarian,
78 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Bulgarian. Compiled by Jon Gartenberg.
FIAF 1989, 149p.: 1.750 BF, 50 US$
International Index to Film Periodicals vol.
25. 1996
Edited by Michael Moulds. 634p.: 95 GB£,
152 US$, 5.800 BF
International Index to Television
Periodicals 1987-1990
Edited by Michael Moulds. 636p.: 80 GB£,
135 US$, 4.800 BF
Subject Headings (Film) 1996
123p.: 18 GB£, 30 US$, 1.110 BF
Subject Headings (Television) 1992
98p.: 16.50 GB£, 25 US$, 900 BF
The lists of headings incorporate all the
terms used in the Indexes, and are intended
for use in the documentation departments
of the member archives of FIAF.
International Directory of Film and TV
Documentation Collections
A publication of the FIAF Documentation
Commission, this 220 page volume
describes documentation collections held in
125 of the world’s foremost film archives,
libraries, and educational institutions in
fifty-four countries. The Directory is organized
by country and indexed by city and
special collections. Edited by René
Beauclair.
1994:50 GB£, 80 US$, 3.000 BF.
FIAF Classification Scheme for Literature
on Film and Television
by Michael Moulds. 2d ed. revised and
enlarged, ed. by Karen Jones and Michael
Moulds. FIAF 1992.
35 GB£, 60 US$, 2.100 BF.
Annual Bibliography of FIAF Members’
Publications
from 1979: 450 BF, 12 US$ (each)
Bibliography of National Filmographies
Annotated list of filmographies, journals
and other publications. Compiled by
D.Gebauer. Edited by H.W.Harrison. FIAF
1985, 80p.: 1.080 BF, 30 US$
Third FIAF Study on the Usage of
Computers for Film Cataloguing
Provides description of computers, software
and systems in use in various archives
around the world, analysing differences and
similarities. By Roger Smither for the FIAF
Cataloguing Commission, FIAF 1990, 59p.:
1.050 BF, 30 US$*

Evaluating Computer Cataloguing Systems
- A Guide for Film Archivists
by Roger Smither, for the Cataloguing
Commission.FIAF 1989, 35p.: 1.050 BF, 30
US$*
*These last two publications are available together
at a special price of 1.750 BF, 50 US$
Règles de catalogage des Archives de films
Version française de “The FIAF Cataloguing
Rules of Film Archives” traduite de l’anglais
par Eric Loné.
AFNOR 1994, 280 p., ISBN: 2-12-484312-
5, 1.300 BF, 35 US$
Reglas de Catalogación de la FIAF para
Archivos Fílmicos
Traducción española de The FIAF Cataloguing
Rules for Film Archives por Jorge Arellano
Trejo, editada por Nelly V. Cruz Rodríguez e
Iván Trujillo Bolio. México, 1998. 240 pp.,
ISBN-968-36-6741-4. 1.050 francos belgas,
30.- US$.
American Film Index , 1908-1915.
American Film Index , 1916-1920.
Index to more than 32.000 films produced
by more than 1000 companies. “An indispensable
tool for people working with
American films before 1920” (Paul Spehr).
Edited by Einar Lauritzen and Gunnar
Lundquist.
Volume I: 1.800 BF, 50 US$ - Volume II:
2.200 BF, 60 US$. - 2 Volumes set: 3.600
BF, 100 US$.
Programming and Access to
Collections / Programmation et accès
aux collections
Manual for Access to the Collections
Special issue of the “Journal of Film
Preservation”, #55 (Nov. 1997): 500 BF, 14
US$.
The Categories Game / Le Jeu des
Catégories
A survey by the FIAF Programming
Commission offering listings of the most
important films in various categories such
as film history, film and reality, film and the
other arts, national production and works
in archives. Covers some 2.250 titles, with
several indexes.
Une enquête réalisée par la Commission de
Programmation de la FIAF offrant des listes
des films les plus importants dans différentes
catégories telles que l’histoire du cinéma,
79 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
cinéma et réalité, cinéma et autres arts, la production
nationale et le point de vue de
l’archive. Comprend 2.250 titres et plusieurs
index.
ISBN 972-619-059-2. FIAF 1995: 1.500 BF,
40 US$.
Miscellaneous / Divers
Cinema 1900 - 1906: An Analytical Study
Proceedings of the FIAF Symposium held at
Brighton, 1978.
Vol.1 contains transcriptions of the papers.
Vol.2 contains an analytical filmography of
550 films of the period. FIAF 1982, 372p.:
1.750 BF, 50 US$
The Slapstick Symposium
Dealings and proceedings of the Early
American Slapstick Symposium held at the
Museum of Modern Art, May 2-3, 1985.
Edited by Eileen Bowser.
FIAF 1988, 121p.: 950 BF, 27 US$
Newsreels in Film Archives
Based on the proceedings of FIAF’s
‘Newsreels Symposium’ held in Mo-i-Rana,
Norway, in 1993, this book contains more
than 30 papers on newsreel history, and on
the problems and experiences of contributing
archives in preserving, cataloguing and
providing access to news film collections.
Edited by Roger Smither and Wolfgang
Klaue.
ISBN 0-948911-13-1 (UK), ISBN 0-8386-
3696-9 (USA), 224p. illus.: 2.000
BF, 50US$
Available from other sources
Handbook for Film Archives, A
Basic manual on the functioning of a film
archive. Edited by Eileen Bowser and John
Kuiper. New York 1991. 200p. US$ 30.
ISBN 0-8240-3533-X. Available from
Garland Publishing, 1000A Sherman Av.
Hamden, Connecticut 06514
Archiving the Audiovisual Heritage: a joint
technical symposium
Proceedings of the 1987 Technical
Symposium held in West Berlin, organised
by FIAF, FIAT & IASA. 30 papers covering
the most recent developments in the preservation
and conservation of film, video and
sound. Berlin 1987, 169p. DM 45.
Available from Stiftung Deutsche
Kinemathek, Heerstrasse 18-20, 14052
Berlin, Germany.
Archiving the Audiovisual Heritage: third
joint technical symposium
Proceedings of the 1990 Technical
Symposium held in Ottawa, organised by
FIAF, FIAT & IASA. Ottawa 1992, 192p.
US$40. Available from George Boston, 14
Dulverton Drive, Furzton, Milton Keynes
MK4 1DE, United Kingdom.
Il Documento audiovisivo: Tecniche e
metodi per la catalogazione
Italian version of “The FIAF Cataloguing
Rules of Film Archives”.
Available from Archivio Audiovisivo del
Movimento Operaio e Democratico, Via F.S.
Sprovieri, 14 - 00152 Roma, Italy.
Available from K.G.Saur,
Postfach 771009,
8000 München 71, Germany
International Directory of
Cinematographers, Set and Costume
Designers in Film
Twelve volumes related to German Democratic
Republic, Poland; France; Albania,
Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania, Yugoslavia;
Germany; Denmark, Finland, Norway,
Sweden; Italy; Spain, Portugal; Hungary;
Czechoslovakia; Cuba, Soviet Union; Edited
by Alfred Krautz. Compiled by FIAF.
Terms and Methods for Technical
Archiving of Audiovisual Materials
In English, French, German, Spanish and
Russian. Compiled and edited by Günter
Schulz for the FIAF Cataloguing
Commission and by Hans Karnstädt for the
FIAF Preservation Commission, 1992. ISBN
3-598-22592-X. 87p.
The FIAF Cataloguing Rules for Film
Archives
compiled and edited by Harriet W. Harrison
for the FIAF Cataloguing Commission,
1991.
ISBN 3-598-22590-3. 240p.
World Directory of Moving Image and
Sound Archives
Detailed listing of 577 audiovisual archives
in 100 countries; compiled and edited by
Wolfgang Klaue. 1993.
ISBN 3-598-22594-6. 192p.

DEBRIE has during a period of 100 years acquired an International reputation in the manufacture of Film laboratory
equipment.
The merger in 1993 with CTM, a very forward looking company with dynamic postproduction equipment
broadened DEBRIE’s product line and allowed the group to supply a very wide range of machines and systems
for the Motion Picture Industry, the preservation and restoration of moving images.
The DEBRIE TAI step printers are highly advanced equipment recommended for linear, blow-up and reduction
optical printing. This includes the famous and unique Archive suited printer which is able to print out the
most delicate of visual details.
Till the mid 50’s, films were made on highly inflammable and chemically instable nitrate stock. To prevent these
masterpieces from being lost and to preserve their splendor, they must be restored and duplicated on modern
acetate and safety stock.
STEP OPTICAL PRINTER: TAI

In order to guarantee safe passage of the original through the wet printer gate and a stable image for the duplicate,
the TAI step printer is equipped with unique film transports systems with pin & registration pin whereby
the distance inbetween is adjustable. The new generation of TAI step optical printer now features:
• full modularity: all machines feature interchangeable printing heads for both original & unexposed film
stock format including liquid gate & projection lenses. These heads may be changed in minutes without the
use of special tools. Translation of the camera film transport mechanism is controlled by block micrometer.
Sprocket location, film transport rollers & printing aperture gate rollers are all factory pre-aligned. The lens
support is mounted on ball rails to make movement easier & is controlled by micrometric screw & clock
micrometer.
• new original optical components along with a reduced distance between the lamphouse & the optical bar
providing a major increase in light available at the printing aperture and higher operating speed (5 to 25 fps).
• new PC based printer control system including diskette driver & program tape reader.
• new unique wet printing liquid circulation system assuring reliable anti scratch & bubble free wet printing.
• new closed wet printing gate with special devices to capture solvent vapours and to exhaust fumes.
• new extended drying cabinet ensuring that the film is perfectly dried before it is being spooled.
CTM / DEBRIE also manufactures:
Processing machines
A complete range of demand drive from 50 to 200 fpm suitable for every type of film ECN2, ECP2, Black &
White.
Video color analyser
For professional grading, the Setter allows: negative & positive film inspection directly on video, Data collection,
Color analysis ie grading of negative/positive film with storage in memory of RGB, FCC, fades.
Different models of 16, 35, 16/35 mm, 2 or 4 plates flatbeds viewing tables with projection by prism in order
to view & check copies. Possibility to view movies in their original speed 16, 18, 20, 22, 24 or 25 frames per
second & to accept shrunk copies. Upon request, low cost film to tape transfer system for the format of your
choice (silent or with sound), 16 or 35 mm, negative or positive. Your video copy is instantly for workprint or
demonstration purposes.
Complete range of Inspection desks and manual electric rewinders or electronic rewinders for all film formats
16, 35 mm with or without shrinkage.
A low cost environmentally safe film cleaner
Designed for CTM rewinding table, 2 mounting devices with PTR rollers made from polyurethane allow to
remove from both side of film, dust, dirt & unwanted particles. No less than 95 % cleaning efficiency. Rollers
can be cleaned with water.
A sprocketless film cleaning machine safe for your old films. It works with Perchloroethylene and uses both
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Variable speed up to 4000 m/h (220 feet/minute).
CTM / DEBRIE: 125 Avenue Louis Roche - 92230 GENNEVILLIERS - FRANCE
Tel: +33 1 40 85 82 82 - Fax: +33 1 40 85 82 63 - E-mail: ctm@club-internet.fr

FIAF INTERNATIONAL FILMARCHIVE CD-ROM
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Ce numéro a été rédigé avec la collaboration de...
Among this issue's contributors...
ISSN 1017-1126
Eileen Bowser is the former Curator of the Depratment of Film at
MoMA and author of numerous books on American film history
(New York).
Francisco Gaytan is the Head of Preservation at the Filmoteca
de la UNAM (México).
Jan-Christopher Horak is Director of the Münchner
Stadtmuseum - Filmmuseum (München).
Martin Koerber is researcher in cinema studies at the Stiftung
Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin).
Nieves López-Menchero is Head of the Documentation and
Publications Department of the Filmoteca de la Generalitad
Valenciana (Valencia).
Enno Patalas is cinema researcher and former Director of the
Münchner Stadtmuseum - Filmmuseum (München).
Roger Smither is Head of the Film and Video Archive at the
Imperial War Museum (London) and Secretary General of FIAF.
Brian Taves, Ph.D., University of Southern California, works
at the Motion Picture/ Broadcasting/ Recorded Sound Division of
the Library of Congress. He is the author of numerous publications
on cinema and is writing a book on 300 film and television
adaptations of Jules Verne from around the world.
Olwen Terris is Chief Cataloguer at the National Fim and
Television Archive of the BFI (London).
Pierre Véronneau est historien et critique de cinéma, il est
conservateur des collections non film de la Cinémathèque
québécoise (Montréal).
Peter von Bagh is film author, director and researcher. He is the
editor of the magazine Filmhillu (Helsinki).